Aeon Natum Engel
by EarthScorpion
Summary: That is not dead which can eternal lie. And with strange aeons even death may die. Well, now it is the Strange Aeon, and the undying live again. The Evangelion Units may be able to face the Herald-entities, but what of the dangers within? Eva/Cthulhutech.  Now complete; see Aeon Entelechy Evangelion for the rewrite.
1. Chapter 1: Herald Attack

_**Author's Note:** This story is Aeon Natum Engel, a story which, as you can see, below, crosses Neon Genesis Evangelion with Cthulhutech. It was, however, more relevantly, my first ever major fic, and boy, does it show. After a while, the personal dissatisfaction with the earlier parts of the story grew and grew_,_ to the point that I rebooted the fic, and began again, in a full (and, IMO, much better) rewrite. If you've only stumbled over this, I would recommend you go back to my user page, and go to the rewrite, **Aeon Entelechy Evangelion**, which is newer, shinier, better written, and generally something that I'm a lot happier with. On the other hand, ANE isn't terrible, by the standards of fan-fiction, and it is complete, so I'm not telling you to run away screaming. It's just that AEE is just, IMO... well, better.  
_

_Of course, if you have read AEE, you might want to check this out, to see what the fic's 'father' was like (or maybe frumpier older sister). _

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~'/|\'~

Aeon Natum Engel

A retelling of Neon Genesis Evangelion, set in the Cthulhutech universe.

**Chapter 1**

**Herald Assault**

**AD 2091**

The sea lapped at the remains of Old London. Those buildings which had survived the First Arcanotech War rose like macabre tombstones to those who had died under the Nazzadi bombardment, while between them, smothered by the devouring tide, were craters, burned into the ancient city by indiscriminate bombing from orbit and the lightning waves of mecha that had swept through the city, putting all to the sword. The flooded streets, grey channels between grey buildings, under a grey sky, seemed to tell a melancholy tale of the hubris of a city that had once considered itself centre of the universe. Once, Old London had sprawled over most of the South of England, a revocation of the anti-urbanisation laws of the twentieth century allowing a phase transition that had turned large amounts of the country into one massive metropolis. Now, Old London was split between the various enclaves, that were towns and even cities within the ruins, and the wastes, which were left to slow succumb to entropy. To the east, the London Arcology, capital of New Earth Government Europe, and Inner London, the domain of the Ashcroft Foundation, held thirty million people, human and Nazzadi; its order a stark contrast to the decay of Old London.

The gently lapping water was barely disturbed by the low passage of a wing of F-109 Komets. Their glowing A-Pods hummed the obsolescence of reaction-based engines, as they flew barely one hundred metres above the ground, the eleven-metre aircraft armed with smart missiles, and a blue-green (optimised to allow air-to-sea strikes) Laser Cannon. Fifty-four million Terranotes flew in that formation, a proud declaration of humanity's will to survive. Let the Migou and their bio-mechanical mechanoids come, they spoke; give us suitable air cover and they can not stand against us. Let the monsters of the Rapine Storm come to Europe; those degenerates and their unnatural allies shall be given a brief lesson in why charging at your opponent, screaming for blood and other bodily fluids, has been considered unwise for three hundred years. Let the abominable hybrids of the Esoteric Order of Dagon and their inhuman parents emerge from the seas where they have cowered for untold millennia; we shall fight them on the beaches, and turn those open plains into a killing field.

The eyes of First Lieutenant Cevy were drawn to a dark shape, swimming up the mouth of the Thames. Her on-board scanners had only just picked it up at all; a liability of modern days. So many of the creatures that emerged from the shadows with the start of the Aeon War were invisible to anything technological; a reason for the large canopy of the Komet. More importantly, this creature was massive, swimming up the blasted channel of the river.

First Lieutenant Cevy frowned. _How the hell had that thing got past the battlegroup in the North Sea?_

"HQ, this is Komet Mantis-One. Hostile target detected at 57 degrees 27'06.27 north, 0 degrees 25'26.77 East. Shape is bipedal, blackish in colour. It doesn't match with anything known. Target is Vee-Oh. Might be Eee Oh Dee; shape is wrong for a Migou weapon. Someone get a Sentinel over here!"

"Em Oh, Mantis-One. Target acknowledged and position updated. Reinforcements are five minutes out; do not engage until then. Be aware for hostile AA; target has multiple CB-type weapons and can use them against aerial targets."

"Em Oh, Command. Mantis-One out."

The wing, as one, pulled up and away, up to just below the clouds. When the reinforcements arrived, they would hit this monster with enough fire-power to flatten a village.

The land forces held up their positions around the enclaves in Old London. Rows of Vreta Main Battle Tanks, painted blue-grey and hidden under urban camo were placed to fill the killing grounds with 120mm railgun slugs, backed up with M-111A2 Jaeger Howitzers. A Jaeger could punch through a Migou Spider in a single shot, and start firing from twenty four kilometres away. The mecha made possible by Arcanotech were the poster-children of the New Earth Government, but the good old tankers were still around, and the wonders of non-euclidean technology served more traditional designs just as well, if not better.

In the rubble of Old London, the poster-children positioned themselves. Nine metre tall Broadswords were the main punch, backed up by Claymores and specialist Gladiuses were ready to let the monstrosities taste their white-hot flamethrowers. The lighter Nazzadi mecha were in reserve, their gaudy colours not really appropriate for an ambush. And while the final preparations were completed, the loudspeakers blared their warnings into the air.

"Today, at 12:30 pm, a special state of authority has been declared by the New Earth Government. All inhabitants with an arcology pass are to return immediately. All inhabitants of the enclaves within the Eastern Greater London Area are to head to their designated shelters. Temporary martial law is in full effect. Message repeats, today, at 12:30 pm, a special state of authority has been declared..."

~'/|\'~

By Old Waterloo Station, a teenager, clad in a white shirt and dark trousers, stood. The entire station, already merely a minor terminus for the maglev network, thanks to New Waterloo in the London Arcology, London-2, had emptied in what seemed like seconds. Shinji Ikari was only here because of his father, but the bastard hadn't even arranged for him to have an arcology pass. He looked down at the picture of the woman he was meant to meet. What kind of a person sent a what appeared to be a holiday picture as a first introduction? Especially, he added to himself, one of what appears to be a holiday to Nazza-Duhni, the world's first "clothing optional" city. She was actually decent by the standards of human beachwear, but quite a few figures in the background were most certainly not, something which the sixteen year-old had "appreciated". The words "Look here" and the attendant arrow just added to his initial wariness.

He flipped his mobile phone shut in irritation. The phone network had been shut down; all he was getting was the same message as the one blaring through the loudspeakers. He checked his watch, and yawned. He had had a two day stop-over in Chicago, after the plane had been diverted due to Migou activity under the flight path, which had left him less jet-lagged than he might have been, but his body was still screaming at him that it needed sleep and food. The Ashcroft Foundation had paid for the trip, which only added to his surprise; Shinji knew that his father was an important man in Ashcroft Europe, but that they would use a private jet just to carry him was... surprising.

"Where is she?" He paused, and looked around for a sign to a shelter. The speed at which the residents had evacuated indicated that they were used to it.

There was a figure, standing in the half-gloom of the entrance to the arrivals section, a strange, pale girl. An albino, maybe. No, he realised with a gut-clenching feeling. She wasn't pale, she was actively white, with both her skin and hair the colour of fresh milk.

A White xenomix.

A flock of pigeons flew straight towards him, and he ducked, shielding his eyes reflectively. When Shinji looked up again, she was gone. Brow crinkled in puzzlement, he stepped towards where he had seen her. She might be a White, but maybe he could find out where to go to get to safety.

A series of thudding explosions began, from behind him. Reflectively, he ducked back down again. The noise was joined by a chorus of tortured metal and a deep thrumming noise.

Shinji decided that getting out of there was perhaps the most sensible thing to do. He headed as fast as he could to where he had seen the girl, to find where she had gone. And if something really bad was happening, a parapsychic would be a fairly sensible person to be near. Unless they were Burning, of course, which would make them the source of the trouble.

The internal dialogue was shut down, as he ran. Looking up, he could see quite a lot of aircraft heading in towards were he way, tearing through the cloud cover as multiple sonic booms added themselves to the cacophony. Yet more shrieks and explosions filled the air as, unbeknownst to Shinji, large number of Jaegers opened fire.

For Shinji Ikari, it felt like the world was ending.

~'/|\'~

Inside the NEG military headquarters, the mood was sombre.

"The unknown entity is still approaching. It has left the Thames, and is moving as a biped."

"The Magi believe that this rules out it being Migou. Two-to-one certainty predicts that it belongs to the Esoteric Order of Dagon."

"A Sentinel Drone has visual. I'm putting it up on main screen."

At the back of the room stood two advisers from the Ashcroft Foundation. The elder, a white-haired man in a brown suit stood behind the younger, watching the NEG military, while the black haired man stared at the glowing orange Augmented Reality Feeds scrolling across his glasses. The military seemed to edge away from the pair, leaving Gendo Ikari, the local head of the Ashcroft Foundation, and Kozo Fuyutsuki, his second-in-command, in an invisible bubble.

"It's been seventeen years." Fuyutsuki spoke softly. "Since 2074 and the start of the Second War..."

The main scream filled up with the image of the beast that had shrugged off the best that the New Earth Government could throw at it.

It was horrifying.

Unnatural.

It dwarfed the buildings below it, with them barely reaching its knees. The main, hunchbacked body was black, but the black of the void, and like the void, it had tiny speckles within it, that seemed to capture the gaze of those who stared at it too long. Ribs and viscera protruded from the front of the abomination, like someone had taken a human corpse, disembowelled it, then coated it in the essence of the night sky. A glowing red orb, like the eye of some creature that had walked the earth long before man and was merely waiting for the mammals to get over their tiresome delusions, glowed from the front, casting everything before it in a sick red light. A mask was worn upon its face, like the beak of some Stygian plague doctor, from ages past, who came not so much as to heal as to speed his victims to their final destination.

The entire room recoiled at it. Most were able to hold onto their sanity; though the beast was horrific, the children of the Strange Aeon were made of stronger stuff, and beings that would have driven their ancestors screaming into the arms of an asylum orderly could be tolerated. A female human with the stripes of a Second Lieutenant let out an involuntary shriek, and a male Nazzadi fell off his chair, huddled in a foetal ball weeping. As the unfortunate was dragged away to the Ashcroft medical facility outside, Gendo stared at the image of the entity, without any outwards sign of disturbance.

"Heralds..."

~'/|\'~

As Shinji watched, the Herald (though what dynasty would use such a messenger?), even as it strode inexorably towards London-2, raised its hands, covered with too many leech-like fingers. From the mouth of each of the wriggling appendages, vomited a sick, greenish yellow beam that lanced through the air. They each burned cleanly through the gunships strafing the monster, even cutting down the missiles that were volleyed against it. They couldn't seem to track the Jaeger shells that ripped down from over the horizon, but they didn't need to. The 155mm high explosive shells that the howitzers were throwing forth burst like harmless rain against the void-dark body of the Herald. Occasionally, one would knock it back, make it stumble, but something seemed to stop it being hurt.

Shinji glanced at it just once, and then flinched away even as he ran from it. An intense wave of nausea and a nagging headache struck him; that thing shouldn't exist, be allowed to exist. Nothing should be able to take that much fire-power; it was like watching a man run into a flying insect and go flying backwards. It just screamed, in a guttural tone that belonged to the monkey before man, that the world should not, and does not work like this. Even with his back turned to it, he faltered, almost tripping, as the world faded to black.

"...Area are to head to their designated shelters. Temporary martial law is in full effect. Message repeats, today, at 12:30 pm..."

The hum of an A-pod bought the world back to normal for him. A new, very nice looking aircar dropped from the sky and, in an incredible act of handling, pulled to a stop in front of him, the wheels deploying automatically as it shifted into ground mode. The door slid upwards and a dark-haired woman clad in military issue body armour and a pair of sun glasses, the woman who he was meant to meet, smiled at him.

"Sorry to keep you waiting," she smiled.

Shinji could only stare blankly back, the mixture of jet lag, the shock of the being and now this surprise addling his wits. After a second or two, her expression changed to a frown.

"That means, "get in!" This is a warzone! And put on your seatbelt"

Shinji could only clamber in, still dazed. The woman kicked at the throttle, and yanked the control-shaft downwards. The wheels folded back up, and the Zephyr Enforcer 2000 pulled a tight corkscrew upwards, accelerating to one hundred and eighty miles an hour in six seconds.

That was enough to make Shinji finally lose control of his stomach. Luckily, the woman, Misato Katsuragi, had anticipated the effect that such a manoeuvre might have on those not used to her... idiosyncratic driving style, and had activated the automated sick catcher. This miracle of modern technology had saved innumerable car interiors from the corrosive contents of the human stomach, and had made its inventor, a refugee from what had been China before the Rapine Storm happened, a very wealthy individual indeed.

~'/|\'~

The air in the command centre was turning to a type of professional panic. Glances were being surreptitiously directed against the two Field Marshals in charge of the NEG forces for the United Kingdom, the third currently organising strikes against Dagonite forces in the North Sea.

"All air units within range have been destroyed. Artillery bombardment is having no effect."

"Ground forces are engaged. Target has broken off attack to target Alpha Squadron. Their Auphan reports that it is jamming its extra-sensory equipment." The woman pauses. "Their Cherub has just been destroyed by the charge beams it is using. They are reporting that their..."

"Alpha Squadron's Auphan has been incapacitated. They are requesting permission to..."

Field Marshal Lehy leapt to her feet, and banged her coal-black hand into the table. An old school Nazzadi general, she had been one of the individuals responsible for the death of Old London, favouring cold, sterile strikes on anywhere where humanity could get food. She considered it somewhat appropriate, as her penance, that she would keep London-2 safe.

"Get those Engels out of there. It seems to be targeting them. Retreat away from London-2. Mobilise all conventional forces in the area, and prepare for a simultaneous strike."

Field Marshal Jameson glared at her.

"We'll get nowhere with that level of fire-power. It's already withstood three divisions worth of artillery."

"It's protected by an AT field, as we suspected." Fuyutsuki said softly, for the ears of Gendo only, in the hubbub of the command centre.

"Like Yog-Soggoth's Shield, conventional weapons will not harm it," was the reply.

The Field Marshalls were by now locked in a staring contest.

"Three nought point one kiloton pure fusion bombs set to airburst above it," stated Jameson, calmly. "They will not damage London-2, and they should at the very least hurt this Herald."

"And the enclaves? There are four within the kill-radius, and you will destroy Old Waterloo," hissed Lehy back.

"They knew the risks when they chose to live outside London-2. Anyway, if they are in the bunkers as they should be, they should be fine from an airburst. We have to do it now, before the Herald gets too close to the arcology." His calmness had by then become ice cold.

Field Marshal Lehy looked away first.

"Project the effects of a Clover-type tactical strike."

She stared at the three overlapping circles, and their positions relative to the marked populations.

"Rotate pi by twelve, then deploy."

She activated the implants in her left hand with a thought, the subdermal lights glowing blue beneath her night-coloured skin. Jameson's hand was already glowing.

"On the count of three, authorise."

"One."

"Two."

"Three."

Both hands were placed into the complex three-dimensional hologram before them, and they made the code gestures to authorise the use of pure fusion devices in a circumstance where there might be human fatalities.

"We're going to have to move the Sentinels away, commanders. We'll lose visuals on the Herald until we can move them back."

Lehy nodded her head. "Approved."

Jameson was heard by some to faintly mutter something about a desire that they still had satellites. The Nazzadi ignored him.

~'/|\'~

Shinji Ikari was a quiet boy. He was polite, fairly intelligent, a good chef, and good on the cello, if a little sarcastic at times. He would make a nice, somewhat submissive husband for someone someday. That comment had actually been written in his file by the school's councillor. The existence of widespread psychiatric counselling in the Strange Aeon had left him quite a lot more mentally stable than he might have been otherwise; he still preferred to be alone, but he was capable of more than he might have been.

And circumstances were much altered from what they had been one hundred years ago. The population of the Earth was 4.3 billion individuals. Only 2.5 billion of them were human, down from a peak of eight billion only a few decades ago. The definition of "mental stability" had undergone quite noticeable redefinition. Almost no-one over the age of twenty had not lost a close family member, to the First Arcanotech War, to the genocidal Migou, to the depredations of the Rapine Storm and the rape camps of the Esoteric Order of Dagon, and many of the younger ones were similarly bereaved. What was one more child with a dead mother and a father who would not care for him?

Shinji had been raised by a foster couple employed by the Ashcroft Foundation, by two women, Gany, an Ashcroft-employed sorceress, and Yuki, an FSB agent, both of whom refused the title of "mother". He was fluent in Japanese, English (the tongue of the New Earth Government), and the Nazzadi tongue, and Gany had insisted that he keep up the cello. He had also picked up enough German to swear, but Gany had not appreciated him repeating those words in front of Yuki. He was clear, though, as were they, that they were not his real parents, and since the twins were born, he had subtly retreated away from. He had thought that this summoning from his father, despite its brevity, might even be a chance to properly know him. Maybe Gendo had changed. Maybe it might be good.

Being in the car of this madwoman, with her mad driving and general madness was not his idea of a good time.

Not one bit. He had already thrown up twice more, especially since Misato (she insisted that he call her than, rather than Ms Katsuragi), seemed to like the idea of streets in general, but not the actual driving along the ground bit, which just resulted in too-fast jaunts at the high of the lamp-posts. And bent pieces of metal. And the occasional collapsed tenement. And the far-too-frequent barrel rolls, just for fun.

He was sure that she really needed a councillor. And, preferably, some kind of leash. He clamped down on the resulting thoughts after only a brief interlude, as while they were rather enjoyable thoughts, they were not quite appropriate when he was hurtling five metres of the ground in an entropic... my gods, did she just drive through that crater in the row of houses rather than take the corner? Yes, yes she did.

Shinji Ikari threw up again. As his stomach was empty by now, there was only bile left, and it was an unpleasant experience.

Misato looked at Shinji with a mixture of pity and contempt. He really didn't seem to be good with motion sickness, did he. Mind you, she'd heard from Ritsuko that his father was the same, which was always good for a smirk. Shinji and Gendo; they didn't really belong in the same picture, from what she could tell. The reports she'd read about Shinji generally said the same things; quiet, polite, somewhat forgettable. The Representative of Ashcroft Europe, and former second in command of Ashcroft Oceanasia, fit none of those boxes.

Her radio chattered. It was on the priority band, over-riding the classical musical channel.

"All units, evacuate. Sigma-Sigma-Gamma-Delta-Pi. All units, evacuate."

Her mind put the code together. A Clover strike!

Damn. She had to get out of the air. She checked the automap; there was the Hammersmith Enclave nearby. It'd be safer there, with modern buildings to shield them.

"Shinji, get down! Close your eyes! They're using nukes on the entity! In the city!"

The car twisted, and bumped gently as she pulled it to a stop that would be impossible without modern D-Engines, braking from one hundred and twenty miles an hour to still. As soon as she could release the steering column, she threw herself on top of him, pinning him down.

"...calling, see we ain't got no high/Except for that one with the yellowy eyes/ The ice age is coming, the sun's zooming in..." screamed the radio, until the wash of static cut it off.

Three new suns bloomed over London, as the earth pulsated. The fireball washed out, demolishing the already decaying buildings in a cleansing wave of atomic, while the blast wave tore age-softened concrete from steel frames like bread. The Old City earned itself another scar from Lehy the Butcher.

The blast was mostly spent by the time it reached Misato and Shinji. The car rocked a bit, but remained upright.

Then a lamp-post fell on it, crushing the back of the car.

Misato raised her palm to her forehead.

"Not the A-pods..."

Misato was somewhat aggrieved by the time she badgered the ill-looking Shinji to shift it. It was positively plastered with posters, all of a handsome Arabic male model. He really was attractive, she thought, as she strained. Almost a little pharonic-looking. Although the poster could be improved by the removal of the boxers...

The A-pods seemed to be intact, but the D-engine was damaged, and, frankly, the inclusion of non-euclidean technology in car engines made the repair liable to damage your sanity worse than the engine. Her eyes flicked to a nearby Tescorp shop. They wouldn't miss a few D-cells, would they...

~'/|\'~

"Detonation successful. The target exhibited anti-missile defences, but the dummy warheads served their role."

The main view screen was whited out.

"T-minus one minute before we can move the Sentinels back in position."

Field Marshal Jameson nodded his head.

"Move the units back in position. It should be destroyed, so have a collection team ready to salvage what we can."

Field Marshal Lehy's red eyes reflected the white screen back, like catseyes. She sat, silently, her face impassive.

"Sentinels back in position. Thermal bloom prevents IR, too much dust in the air for visuals. Switching to X-ray."

The screen protruded out, the Augmented Reality of modern holography giving a true three-dimensional image.

One single spike towered in the clover-shaped gap in Old London. As the resolution improved, the shape was confirmed.

The antediluvian monster had survived.

"Kokopy!" yelled Lehy, slamming her fist into the data-desk before her. "How is it still upright!"

"That was not expected by the Magi." Jameson looked over at Lehy, his cold blue eyes meeting her red ones. "I propose another Clover strike."

"What is the status of the target? Has it been damaged at all?" The comment was directed at the tactical officers.

"Unclear. The target has stopped moving." The Nazzadi officer, lit by the three-dimensional AR panel she was manipulating, paused. "The target's X-ray profile is changing. It's getting more dense, and protrusions are... growing. I can see the bones under the skin as a patch of density. They're more dense than lead!"

"Focus, Lieutenant," snapped Lehy. "What are growing?"

"Unknown. They appear to be appendages, and appear similar to the things upon its hands. Weapons, as a first degree projection."

"It's regenerating, as we expected," said Gendo softly, from the back of the room. "It is appropriate for its status as a target."

He pushed his glasses up, back onto his nose.

"And we will lose E-9 coverage within a matter of seconds."

"Energy pulse detected in the new appendages," yelled a tactical officer.

The main screen cut out, as the big red words "Signal Lost" lit up.

"Strike approved." The Nazzadi Field Marshal nodded at the human. "Let's nuke that thing until it... dies."

Gendo sat back in his chair.

"That is not dead which can eternal lie. And with strange aeons even death may die." These words were so soft that even his old teacher could only lip-read him.

"But Alhazred could not really see now. He was a primitive in a society that could not even solve the Ashcroft-Yi equations. Now is the Strange Aeon, and the Herald bears his message too late," Fuyutsuki mouthed back.

"The next missiles will not get through. The Herald can learn and change."

Gendo's words were proved right by yells of rage from the front of the room.

"Ah." Fuyutsuki frowned. "It has acquired intelligence."

He paused.

"What will you do now?"

Gendo stood up, staring at the blank view screen. They were already re-routing as much informational coverage of the eldritch abomination. Even as he stared, a new visual lit up of the Herald, its ribcage extended and fused, and prehensile tentacles emerging from its shoulders, waving here and there in implausible, spasmodic fluctuations. The barrage of shells from the Jaeger artillery had already resumed, but these new tentacles were intercepting many of these.

He glanced back at his sensei.

"I will wait for them to come to me. They know about the project they ridiculed as a "primitive Engel". And then?"

He smiled faintly.

"I will activate Unit 01."

"Unit 01." A faint hint of disappointment crept into Fuyutsuki's voice. "But we don't have a pilot."

"One will arrive soon." The words were not so much stated as declaimed, written into reality as an irremovable statement.

It only took three minutes for the NEG Army's will to accede to what Gendo Ikari knew to be an inevitability. A few quiet words were all that was needed with the resident Field Marshals. They knew it already. They had the best arcanotechnicians outside the Ashcroft Foundation (excluding the Chrysalis Corporation, but Gendo knew that most of the NEG was not familiar with that) advising them, and they knew the damage which the creature had absorbed. Officially, the Evangelion Project had been subsumed by the Engel Project after Dr Anton Miyakame had worked around many of the issues with the Evangelions. But the Engels were conventional weapons of war, that used inhuman flesh twinned with the two branches of _homo sapiens_. They relied upon kinetic energy and human weaponry. The Evangelions may be seen as an obsolete white elephant, flawed in their control scheme, but Gendo had his trump card...

~'/|\'~

Shinji Ikari stood deep in the bowels of Inner London, the subterranean dome below London-2 that was the domain of the Ashcroft Foundation. London-2 had been amazing, an entire artificial ecosystem within a building, complete with animals and vegetation. They had been fast waved through the system, subjected to only three blood checks, and one neural scan, the latter to get into Inner London.

The Inner Sanctum.

Before him, immersed in fluid like an drowned idol belonging to a long dead civilisation, was a massive biped, its head glaring from the depths. Even from a distance, Shinji could feel a sort of ancient malevolence, like he was desecrating a tomb merely by being near the construct.

"A giant face," he blurted out. "It's... it's a massive Engel, isn't it."

A blond scientist standing in the middle of the gantry, holding a clipboard, glared at him.

"It's not an Engel," she snapped. "Engels are inferior copies of the technology invented for the Evangelion Project."

She tucked a loose hair behind her ear, and pointed somewhat dramatically at the Evangelion.

"Behold, Humanity's Original Synthorg, Evangelion!"

The Evangelion was painted in a mottled purple, blue and grey camouflage scheme; a classic urban pattern, despite its size. Its red eyes glowed a dull red, set as they were over a jaw shielded by thickened armour. One massive horn, hyper-edged, protruded from its forehead.

It was a creature of war, death, and fear.

"This is Unit 01, the Second Prototype Model. We believe that this is humanity's last chance."

Shinji frowned.

"Excuse me, Doctor...?"

"Doctor Ritsuko Atagi."

"Doctor Atagi, but the Engels have been around for over ten years. How is this the prototype if the Engels have been around for so long, and I've never heard of them."

She narrowed her eyes. Evidently, she had a wonderful speech ready which he had disrupted, or this was a major raw nerve.

"After the construction of the first prototypes, funding was shifted to the cheaper, more... controllable Engels. We have suffered reduced funding for a long while because of Dr Miyakame and his defection."

Shinji cringed.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I didn't know."

A light flicked on, above the Evangelion, creating a backlit silhouette, and an amplified voice boomed out throughout the chamber.

"No, you didn't. And you wouldn't."

Gendo Ikari stared down at his son. Around him, camera feeds showed his progeny from every angle.

Shinji's eyes widened in shock. Father, he subvocalised. Memories threatened to overwhelm him, years of ambivalent hatred for the man who abandoned him after the worst day of his life. He restrained them, ignored them. He would not look away. He had the willpower, the tenacity to resist the urge.

He glared up at the light, putting on his coldest voice, the one that Gany had used to scold him.

"What am I doing here, Father. Why did you summon me to this place from Japan? Since I arrived I have been abandoned, nearly been killed by an entity, and been subjected to some of the least responsible driving I have ever experienced."

Gendo stared back down. Deep down, a tiny scab was knocked off his soul. That tone of voice; that sounded a lot like Yui when she had been in a mood. Even the facial proportions were similar.

He flexed his new hands, still sore from the transplant. The protective gloves covered the new, soft skin, and they ached.

None of the emotions showed on the Representative's face. Ashcroft had merely added to his natural skills in that area.

Behind Shinji, Misato and Ritsuko began to argue about the Evangelion. Shinji half ignored them, most of his his attention focussed upon staying calm in this war of wills with his father. A few phrases clicked together, though, and he felt a terrible prescience about what they would have him do.

"You want me to be an Engel pilot?" Shinji said, staring up at the shadow.

"Evangelion. It's an Evangelion, not an Engel," muttered Dr Atagi from behind him. "And, yes, we do."

"Impossible." Shinji stated, flatly. He raised his hand to forestall the doctor's objection. "You need a special implant to use one of these things, and I don't have it. So, unless you want..."

Shinji cut himself off, suddenly fearful about where this was going.

"And anyway, I won't. You can't make me, you can't conscript me; the NEGA and the NEGN are purely volunteer armies, and I don't want to go any closer to that creature."

He paused, and shook, involuntarily, as he saw it cut apart the air strikes and shrug off the artillery.

"I saw it this afternoon, far too close. I don't want to see it again."

He straightened up.

"You abandoned me. At age four. Go find some professional soldier to do it. Why would you need an untrained sixteen-year old, anyway?"

Gendo glared back down at him.

"Target has opened fire on London-2. Arcology wall breached by energy weapon."

Gendo Ikari nodded his head once at the message.

"The potential pilot is useless. A replacement will be obtained." He switched to Fuyutsuki, up in Command headquarters. "Prepare Rei. I don't care about her physical condition. We need to get Unit 01 working, to save the city."

This makes no sense, Shinji thought. Why would they go to all the effort of getting me from Japan if they could obtain a pilot here, in London-2. Thus, I am preferable to whoever the replacement is. Which means that the effort required to transport someone to the other side of the globe is considered less than the effort required to find a replacement. Who on earth would keep a potential pilot so far away from the vehicle, anyway? Or not give them any training?

The conditions in which an individual is raised can have drastic effects on their personality. Some Shinji Ikaris, in the tumultuous depths of the narrative universe, had been raised by uncaring foster parents, left to retreat inwards until their self-loathing reached approximately the same density as degenerate matter. One, via an exceedingly complex series of events that had involved time-travel, malevolent deities (on his side), and a very special tutor, had ended up as a Machiavellian genius who put his father to shame. The Shinji Ikari, though, which this tale concerns, was raised from age four by a Federal Bureau of Security (Behavioural Analysis Unit) agent, and an arcanotherapist (medicinal). A bright child cannot help but pick up a few things, especially when heritage is taken into account.

His internal questioning was broken by the humming of a A-pod equipped hospital bed being pushed into the hall. A girl, clad in what looked like a pilot's suit, was lying upon it. Shinji could not help raising his eyebrows, for she looked a lot like the White he had seen by the train station. Then again, Whites tended to look fairly similar, as the lack of normal pigmentation removed so many of the traces that humans and Nazzadi alike used to identify each other.

As she got closer, though, he could see that her skin looked wrong, far too fresh. She had the protective eyepiece that a newly regrown eye required on her right eye, and all the skin he could see was that disturbing, infant-like texture. Gany would have screamed and demanded to see who was in charge if she had seen that; patients shouldn't be out of a sterile environment when it was like that.

Shinji stared back up at his father.

"So, this is your pilot," he said calmly. He felt a sudden wave of anger, just from seeing her like that, as a petty affront to him. His father was right; they did need him.

He balled his fists in rage

"She shouldn't be out of a sterile environment," he shouted up at the glass. "She shouldn't be out of hospital!"

Gendo smiled, faintly. He had his son, now. "Your cowardice makes it necessary."

His moment of triumph of wills was cut short by the Herald firing a beam, down into the earth. Exhibiting more fire-power than a NEGN Battleship, it punched through the thick shielding of Inner London and left a three dimensional hole of death and destruction through the layers of the arcology. Debris rained down through the domain of the Ashcroft Foundation and a section of the ceiling in the Evangelion hall broke away, plummeting towards the White xenomix, who had herself been knocked from the bed as the A-pod gave out as the floor rocked.

Shinji grabbed her to haul her out of the way. Sadly, even the weakest of the four fundamental forces still provided more acceleration than he could provide, and too late he realised that all he had managed was to get himself into a position where he could be crushed. Surprisingly, the lethal debris was stopped short of crushing the two of them as the Evangelion-class Engel lifted its massive hand from the lake to shield them.

"Impossible!" yelled Dr Akagi, prone on the floor. "It broke free! It should even be able to move; the entry plug hasn't been inserted!" She paused in her rant, and checked the AR tool around her wrist. "The D-Engine isn't even enabled! I'm going to get to the bottom of how this could happen," she added, more softly. "Anyway, prepare Evangelion Unit 01 for a new pilot."

"Yes, Doctor. Preparing new profile," came the reply over the loudspeakers.

~'/|\'~

Within a few minutes, Shinji had been changed into a standard issue Engel Suit and loaded into their entry plug. Dr Akagi had been insisting on calling it a "plug suit", but he was beginning to suspect that, as an Ashcroft Foundation scientist who seemed to work regularly with arcanotechnology, her grasp on reality was a little bit looser than most.

He felt around the neck, feeling a rigid seal. It felt vaguely noose-like

"Hey," Shinji asked the floating head of Misato projected on the interior wall of the plug, "Isn't there meant to be a helmet for this?"

"Well, Engels need a helmet, but the control scheme of an Evangelion requires that you don't wear one," she replied. "The plug should start filling with fluid; you can breathe it it, as it's hyper-oxygenated."

Right on cue, a thick, viscous fluid started pooling and rising in the capsule at an alarming rate. It was a dark orange-red, he saw, and vaguely necrotic, like the colour of a scab. The entire plug stank of blood, with strange currents and undertones to the scent.

Shinji held his breath until it covered his head, feeling somewhat unclean just from its clinging contact with his skin, and then exhaled all the air in his lungs in one go.

The liquid (LCL, he heard the doctor's voice in his ear) tasted exactly as it smelt. That is to say, absolutely vile. Shinji began to gag; a difficult proposition when you have no air in your lungs, and an act that mostly results in pain.

"Don't worry, you'll get used to it soon," was the somewhat heartless comment over the radio.

Dr Akagi turned to her main assistant, Maya Ibuki, a short, cheerful, yet somewhat withdrawn woman, who was manning the main control desk.

"How is it?"

"The pilot's body remains intact. Vitals are elevated, likely from stress. No abnormal brain patterns." Maya looked up at her mentor. "He's still alive. Your predictions on the necessary qualities for a candidate were correct. Shall I connect the D-Engines?"

Ritsuko nodded once. "Do it." She paused. "Monitor the synchronisation ratio once the Evangelion boots up. If it goes above 90% or dS/dt exceeds 3 percent per second, abort immediately. We don't want another repeat."

"Yes, senpai. Acknowledged and logged" Maya moved her hands through the three-dimensional matrix before her.

A complex spiral appeared in the air before her. Consisting of two sin functions around a central axis, the projection resembled a double helix more than anything. As they watched, the two lines rotated around the axis, moving closer.

"Synchronisation is forty eight... no, fifty one, no, fifty two percent. Stabilising... fifty four." She snapped her fingers within the AR matrix. "dS/dt is constant, plus or minus 0.8%."

Ritsuko stared at the graph, almost hoping for it to be wrong.

"Incredible."

"Harmonics are steady and strong. Vital signs are still strong. No mental contamination, as of yet."

"It took Rei seven months to achieve a stable connection, even with the shells. This is astonishing. If we can replicate this, we can beat Dr Miyakame and his damn Engel Synthesis Interface."

~'/|\'~

The mood within the Evangelion itself was somewhat less tranquil, as Misato briefed Shinji on what they expected him to do.

"... so, you don't exactly want me to fight the thing, even after all this," Shinji said in surprise.

"No, not at all. You'll be backed up by a squadron of Engels, which will be the ones which will kill the target. Your job is the most important, though."

She pulled up a projection within the capsule.

"You've seen the creature, and some of what it can shrug off. We believe it has a protective field which replicates a second-tier sorcery. It seems to naturally produce it, as the spell shorts out all machinery on the person if we use it. The Evangelion can produce a similar field; we call it an AT-field. Two fields, if put in proximity and set similarly, can cancel each other out. Phase, anti-phase, see."

"So, wait." Shinji frowned, even as the feeling of the LCL moving against skin made it feel like he was covered in bugs. "Why can't other Engels produce this "AT-field"? Or can't you just use the sorcery against a weapon, to put the field it, and then just give it to something else?"

"Because this is an Evangelion, not an Engel!" came the inevitable response from the good doctor. Shinji groaned. He'd hoped that she hadn't been listening. "And anyway," Ritsuko continued in a more normal tone of voice, "for your latter point, we have."

An image of Unit 01, certain areas highlighted in red appeared before Shinji, levitating in a messianic pose.

"Evangelion Unit 01 is more heavily armed than anything in the New Earth Government that isn't a naval unit. Note the Hyperedged Horn, Claws and the Spurs on the feet. All these objects have been enhanced with a weaponised variant of Dimensional Shield. We hope that the spell will replicate the effects of the AT field, allowing the weapons to stab through. You also have a Hyperedge Blade, mounted under your left forearm. There are also two, head-mounted XV4 heavy laser cannons, synchronised with the eyes, an LR-15 lightning cannon on your left arm, and twinned CB444/AA charge beams attached to the right arm. We've disabled the ranged weapons though; you aren't trained to use them."

Somewhat overwhelmed with the list, Shinji simply nodded his head once.

"Prepare launch!"

~'/|\'~

Within London-2, four more unnatural hybrids of man, Nazzadi, machine, and inhuman monstrosity stalked their target. James in Tabris, his Auphan (Codename: Tragedy), Sarah in Ramiel, her Malach (Codename: Mantis), Wera in Iruel, his Aral (Codename: Shadow), and Jenny in Lilith, her Shinnan (Codename: Bloodmare). They'd heard that Alpha Squadron had been completely destroyed by this thing, and so they were trying their very, very best to keep out of sight.

"Shadow, what's the status on the target?" First Lieutenant Jenny Intry, their CO asked their stealth specialist. Around her, Lilith snapped her claws reflectively.

"Target is still advancing through the arcology. It's firing repeatedly at the ground. It's headed somewhere, and that somewhere is down." He paused, hidden under his stealth field. "It's like it's digging. And it's going straight through the arcology levels."

The unspoken acknowledgement of all the casualties it must be causing passed between the quartet.

"Ashcroft better hurry with their secret project. I've seen it sniffing the air, and it's jamming most of my unconventional senses. I think it suspects something," added Tragedy. "And it's a lot more heavily armed that we are. And it shrugged off a Clover strike."

"Cut the chatter," ordered Jenny, from within the warm, uterine, control capsule. A panel, embedded in the fleshy wall lit up with a priority message. "Okay, the prototype is coming up through the mag-tunnels. Says it's an "Evangelion-class Engel", whatever that is. Haven't heard of it myself."

"But what good can one more of us do?" Wera whispered, in his rather attractive Nazzadi accent.

In front of the target, the ground opened up, with a hiss of supercooled magnets. Riding up on rails, a titanic figure, the same size as the target appeared, in the blues and greys of the NEG. It dwarfed the Engels; Lilith and Ramiel were only (only; it seemed like such a petty word) 13 metres tall, while Iruel and Tabris were shorter.

"Now that is a humongous mecha," stated Sarah. "If it's similar to the target, we might even be in with a chance."

"Ready up," ordered Jenny. "We hit the bastard when he's distracted by the prototype. Try to take out its legs, so it'll stop moving and we can hit it at will."

Shinji Ikari would have been less than reassured by their confidence. For one, they had disabled his ranged weapons. For seconds, they had also put him in a prototype war machine without any real training. He was able to move; the Operator Side Effect luckily worked even with the massive discrepancies in size, and so he knew instinctively how to make the Evangelion do as he wished.

The figure of the Herald loomed before him. Oddly, now that he was in the Evangelion, it didn't seem so horrifying. Of course, maybe the fact that he was now the same size as it played a role in that. He followed the instructions over the radio; it seemed that the movements of the giant Engel were controlled by his own thoughts, with the controls almost just a prop. He flexed his (the machine's?) clawed fingers reflexively, and took a few, slow steps towards the target.

"Good, Shinji!" Misato sounded delighted over the radio. "Now, try activating the AT field!"

Shinji frowned. Somehow, they had never got around to explaining how he did that.

"How? How do I do that?" he exclaimed.

Back down in Inner London, Misato looked helplessly at Ritsuko.

"Yes, how does the pilot use the AT Field?"

"We don't exactly know," the scientist hissed back. "We know that the Evangelion can do it, but we're unclear as to how it is performed."

Misato raised her palm to her forehead. There was a faint slapping sound.

"You mean we risked an Evangelion and an Engel squadron in the hope that the pilot would, in his first go, work out how to use a field that consists mostly of shredded spacetime which we don't understand ourselves."

"We had no other choice. And, anyway, it would be more accurate to say that no-one sane and still human understands AT theory," Ritsuko added, more thoughtfully. "Research into something that involves rotating a one dimensional object that curves through two higher dimensions outside the World of Elements has a very high attrition rate. It's predicted by an expansion of the Ashcroft-Yi equations into an n-dimensional chaotic system. I don't think I have to remind you about what happened to Ashcroft or Yi. Or notable amounts of my mother's team. Or Soryu. Or the other Ikari."

Misato shuddered. Arcane physics was a closed book to her, and Ritsuko, as an accomplished arcanophysicist, arcanobiologist and sorceress, was weird even as an old friend.

"Nevertheless, what should we do?"

Just a little closer, mouthed Jenny within her Engel, as the squadron snuck up on the Herald. The Evangelion-class didn't seem to be doing anything, but it had all the monster's attention. They just needed the field to go down, and they could kill the thing.

The Herald seem to come to a decision. All of its leech-like fingers and the appendages mounted on its shoulders, as one, swivelled to face Unit 01. And in perfect synchronisity, they vomited forth their yellow-green beams. The cutting light swivelled and cut scores across the plating of the Evangelion, knocking it down, onto its back.

Within Unit 01, Shinji screamed and clutched at his face, his body, his limbs. He could feel the monster cutting into him, like hot irons on his skin. His body started convulsing, racked by the pain. Most of the wounds on the Evangelion were cauterised, but some, such as the one punched through his left arm, began spraying blood all over the wrecked interior of this district of London-2. Even the LCL around him seemed to grow warmer, as heat was conducted through the body of the beast.

He slumped back in his pilot's chair, at the edge of unconsciousness. A faint sussuration filled his ears, the whispering of a thousand voices, in perfect harmony and peace. He rolled aside, trying desperately to get out of the way of the burning and pain, but only his body moved, not the Evangelion.

And then it clicked.

_Pain is bad, yes._

_Like a wire in the head._

_But wires are small, thin._

_Easily avoidable._

_So if you rotate the pain, it cancels itself out.  
__  
And if you rotate it again, it can be used as a stabbing tool, to give others pain._

_Good, good, yes. _

Normally, Shinji was sure that that sentence... chain of thoughts would make no sense.

And yet it did. Like the world itself had been rotated, and he had remained static.

He opened his eyes. A filigree network, like a cage of fractured glass, protruded over him. The beams of the Herald licked harmlessly at it, like a match held against a brick wall.

Shinji fainted.

An observer who was not enthralled by the pyrotechnics would have noticed other things about the filigree cage, the AT field. Like the fact that the strands reflected light wrong, not always showing the same scene, or showing it at another time. Through one strange glimpse, Eva 01 lay against a building, blood pouring from its head; through another, a blue-gold Evangelion vomited multi-coloured fire which burned and coruscated. A thousand thousand tales of woe were reflected in that mesh, and a few would be soon enough.

Evangelion 01 picked itself up, off the ground, and roared. A mass of tendrils emerged from its mouth, hungry and scenting, from within its mammalian jaw.

The Aral pilot nodded.

"That's certainly an Engel. Permission to engage?"

Jenny, in her Shinnan, nodded.

"I think this is our best chance. Keep out the way of the Eva-class, though; we don't know what else that prototype can do."

The Herald was confused.

_brotherdietime  
bearmessageofill  
whyfightwhywhywhyrescue_

painpainpain

The Evangelion roared with glee, a dreadful sound, like the scream of a drowning man, a reptilian cry blocked and attenuated by the tentacles that filled its mouth. It grabbed the Herald by both arms, and lent in, a bright corona where the two AT fields met, as the tears in space and time, in the corpus of an great being, tore the air apart at the sub-nuclear level.

As the bubbles of shredded insanity breached and passed each other, Unit 01 vomited more tentacles forth, and affixed them to the glowing red core of the Herald. And the ancient scion of a race that pre-dated humanity knew fear. And pain. And endless suffering.

Fuyutsuki stared at the view screen, deep in Inner London.

"He's won."

The core dimmed, its radiance consumed by a great blackness. As the Evangelion squatted on the body of the Herald, its jaws locked, lamprey style, on the orb, the Engels were belatedly assisting. Twin charge beams from the Shinnan scored further gashes on the core, while the Auphan, its acid-covered manibles slathered, was locked onto the being's hand, consuming a leech-like finger like some alien lizard eating a worm. It consumed the entire finger, then stuck its plasma cannon into the wound, its white carapace soaked in blue blood, and fired, leaving the entire hand to convulse.

As the core began to splinter, as the tentacles of Unit 01 moved from place to place, devouring what they could, the Herald realised what danger it was in. Its mask protruded upwards from the blackness of its body, on a tendril of blackness, looking nothing as much as a primordial cobra.

"Get back, Tragedy!" yelled Wera.

As the Auphan jumped away, activating its A-Pods and soaring away into the sky, more appendages of void emerged from the fallen Herald, all wrapping themselves around Unit 01, while the parts of the Core that the Evangelion had not gotten to began to glow even brighter. The synthorg ignored it, mindlessly trying to consume all that it could.

A barrage of fire slammed into the core. Already damaged, and overloaded with power, it shattered, sending pseudo-crystalline shards tearing through the arcology. The Herald, by now nothing more than a mass of black pseudopodia trying to envelop Unit 01, slumped to the ground, flooding the area with its liquefying, unnatural flesh.

Looking to the artificial sky above it, coated in its own blood and the black, tar-like remains of the Herald, Evangelion Unit 01 raised its head and cried out. The gargling, dying scream shifted to a hideous roar, as the tentacles retracted into its jaw.

And the people throughout the land knew fear.

_Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate _

Deep in Inner London, Gendo Ikari steepled his fingers and smiled, faintly, in satisfaction.

"And thus it begins. The saving of the world."

~'/|\'~


	2. Chapter 2: Transitions of a Terminus

**Chapter 2**

**Transitions of a Terminus**

Shinji Ikari woke to the sight of a smooth white ceiling above him, and the faint smell of antiseptics in the air. The bed below him was nice and soft. Soft was good. The skin on his front itched, like he had been bruised all over.

Raising his head and looking down, he noticed that this was, in fact, the case. A multitude of red welts, like he had been whipped or pressed into a heated wire, covered his bare torso. They looked days old, though, which raised two possibilities. Either he had been unconscious for that amount of time, after... whatever had happened in the Engel, or arcanotherapy was boosting his healing time. As a primary conclusion, he suspected the latter; a suspicion made more certain by the fact that the door was marked with the symbol of the Ashcroft Foundation, and the room had obviously been prepared as a consecrated area for ritual workings.

In the Strange Aeon, all children were taught to recognise that at a very young age. Bad things (things unspecified to young children, but as they aged some of the badness, such as being smeared across thirteen dimensions while still conscious) happened if a sorcerer were distracted. The more inquisitive, those who showed the greatest interest in sorcery and the occult, were shown some pictures by a New Earth Government visitor to the school. Typically, the interest died down after the twelve-year olds were shown what the human body looked like when that had happened. Lots of pink and grey.

Shinji, of course, had already known that. The room upstairs, where Gany had kept her books and her circle, had been locked at all times, and the four year old had been told explicitly that if he made noise around there, bad things could occur to everybody in the house.

His thoughts were dismissed by the noise of the door hissing aside. A nurse, a dark-skinned human in a gleaming white medicinal suit, entered.

"You are awake." The English voice came from the ceiling, from the Augumented Reality display that had just lit up, bathing his face in a cool blue light. It was not a question; they quite obviously had access to his vitals.

"Yes." Shinji blinked his eyes heavily, trying to get his head in shape to speak English. "Uh... who am I speaking to? Is this a LAI or a real person?"

"This is the Type-65H Limited Artificial Intelligence System, attached to the Charing Cross Hospital (London-2), an Ashcroft Foundation medical facility. This hospital is a specialist facility for New Earth Government soldiers and members of the Ashcroft Foundation with both-slash-either physiological and-slash-or psychological injuries." The voice paused. "Your file indicates that you are fluent in English, Japanese and Nazzadi. Would you like this Limited Artificial Intelligence to switch languages?"

"Yes, please." Shinji winced, as he tried moving an arm.

Limited Artificial Intelligences (or LAI, pronounced as an abbreviation) were common in modern society. They were standard in nearly every computer system or computerised device. Indeed most people (excluding the types of people, who, years ago, would have been the type of people who used Linux) wouldn't be to even able to use their computers without the installed LAI, and its voice recognition and gesture interpretation. True AI, on the other hand, was outlawed for the same reasons as cloning; a cocktail of ethical issues, technical problems that made it difficult anyway, and the League for the Preservation of Nazzadi Culture. For some reason, the race of altered humans created and brainwashed to wipe out their progenitors by space fungus from Pluto (or Yuggoth, as they apparently called it) viewed the idea of creating any other kind of life rather negatively. Of course, inevitably, the rules were bent and ignored. The Magi computer system, developed as an offshoot of the Evangelion Project, was one of those little breaches, both from its composition and its theorised potential intellect. Other exceptions existed; top secret projects linked to the Engels, penguins, the GIA FACADE project...

Anyway, in an Ashcroft Facility, the LIA was always going to be more advanced than that on a laptop. The Type-65H was a high operating one, able to monitor the patient, administer drugs, and respond to the typical questions that patients tended to ask. And call for security, to have the subject subdued or terminated. Such things were needed in the Strange Aeon, sadly.

It took the LAI less than a second to upload the Japanese files to active memories.

"Patient Shinji Ikari." The voice itself remained exactly the same, but it switched to flawless Japanese. "Do you wish to know your physiological status? You have not yet submitted a psychiatric evaluation to this facility."

Shinji indicated assent. The machine proceeded to give a full diagnosis, the majority of which Shinji couldn't really understand. After getting it to simplify, he found that he had bruising and some first degree burns, and the LAI indicated that he had been approved for release, subject to mental evalutation.

Well, Shinji thought to himself. Well, well, well. Yesterday...

"LAI, what is today's date?" he asked the ceiling.

"Today is Wednesday, the 22nd of August, 2091. The time is 10:37 am," the voice added, without prompting.

Okay. The day before yesterday. He'd been out for a day. Flexing, he ached, but nothing really hurt, in the stabbing way. Shinji swung his legs out of bed, and held his head in his hands.

Monday, as a day, all things considered, had really been terrible. He could still see the creature. It shouldn't have been. It was wrong. And whatever had happened with the Engel. He'd fainted after the laser (and that in itself was wrong; why was he being hurt when it was the Engel being hurt. He could understand transmitted pain, even if it seemed stupid not to put in some kind of buffer, but there was no way that he should have been burnt by being in the Evangelion.), and then...nothing coherent. There was the memories of thoughts which didn't make sense now, but in the memory of the thoughts they did.

And worse, in the memory of those thoughts, the monster had made sense.

And that was a horrific concept. Cold shivers ran up and down his spine, just at the thought of that.

Shinji Ikari groaned. He was sure that he could have to climb in the entry plug again. All he could hope was that there were no more creatures with AT fields. The other threats to London-2 could obviously be dealt with by conventional forces.

But the body of the creature had been horrific. That one glimpse, that hurried slight backwards, was burned into his mind. Suddenly the evaluation seemed like a good thing...

~'/|\'~

Inner London, sometimes somewhat jokingly called London-Minus, and one of the prototypes funded by the Ashcroft Foundation as a test bed for the technologies involved in the construction of a geocity, was a construction marvel. The sealed buildings, organised for mass public transport and transport by foot, were interspaced with gardens and parks. The arcology even imitated weather, with wind, rain, and snow every Christmas. The D-Engine powered lights, gleaming far above in the greater dome of the geocity, were currently set to day, giving a good replica of daylight, but during the night the lights would dim, and new stars would twinkle above. These were not the night skies of the modern days; the stars were wrong, and kept deliberately so. For one, the glint of the Migou Hive Ship, hypothesised to be the body known as Charon, did not hang above the world, a seemingly ever present reminder of the threat of the Aeon War. The Foundation had designed the entire geocity to have a historic feel, reaching back to the Earth before the modern wars and the ecological damage of the twentieth century. In the midst of this primal beauty, Inner London, a pale girl with a lily, beauteous to the eye, lay. The red lights of the NEG positions, even underground, pooled around the city, marring the corpus while reminding the inhabitants of the price that humanity must pay every day.

The office of Gendo Ikari, in the heart of Inner London, below the London-2 arcology, was the gleaming interior of a sphere. The entire room was a potential source of Augmented Reality projections for his glasses, and the walls themselves could be made transparent, to look down over the domain of the Ashcroft Foundation. The dome, at the peak of Central Dogma, centre of Inner London was the tower for a modern wizard, properly consecrated for rituals as it was.

Currently, the walls were set to dark, and the Ashcroft-Yi equations, source and seal of the wealth and immeasurable influence of the Ashcroft Foundation (still technically a private trust, something its horde of lawyers were very clear to the NEG media, despite the fact that it had a word in every level of government) hung over the surfaces in a profusion of Greek letters, sub-and-superscript characters.

Fuyutsuki stood before his superior.

"We have a problem with Rei."

Gendo looked up from his computer, the code flowing across its surface reflecting off his face like society of eldritch insects. Fuyutsuki shuddered. This place always put him in a morbid frame of mind. But Gendo seemed at ease here, or at the very least concealed it so utterly that he could neither sense, nor feel in any way, discomfort from the man. But he never had, not apart from that one day, locked in the past.

"Explain."

"Because of her removal from a sterile ward while the epidermis had not yet fully acclimatised to its new body, we are getting an immune response against her left arm. Moreover, there is a necrotic bacterial infection in the same limb." The elderly man paused. "Your son was right, you know. Mind you, you were the one who picked out those two women for foster parents. The Nazzadi one was a doctor." A slight smile passed over his face. "I've always wondered why you did that."

Gendo's eyebrows raised slightly in irritation. "I know. But you wouldn't be here to tell me about a routine infection; not in person. Therefore, something else had come up."

"Two somethings, actually. The Committee wishes to speak with you. But, there is a more pressing problem with Rei. The left arm is suffering both dystrophic calcification epidermally and hypophosphoric softening in the actual bone. Moreover, unusual blemishes have appeared around the hand."

Gendo's hands moved through the projected screen, as fresh data rippled over his glasses. Then:

"It is certain."

"It is certain."

He blinked, once.

"Amputate immediately, and grow a fresh one." The black haired man paused, as something caught his eye. "There has been unauthorised tampering with her samples on the medicinal database. Specifically, chromosome 10." His voice grew colder, if possible. "I want a full list of every single person who had access to that data. We will need full DNA and mental scans on all of them, and prepare for full use of the Clauses."

"I anticipated that. The individuals have already been noted to Internal Security."

"Thank you." The words were a pleasantry, nothing more or less. "Now, I must talk to a few... people. I will have to justify activating Unit 01 ahead of schedule, and with what they will see as the wrong Pilot."

~'/|\'~

Rei Ayanami lay in her hospital bed, her lumiescent white skin beaded with sweat. As Ashcroft-loyal medical orderlies swarmed around the bed, her left arm already encased in a MAU, she was left to silently blend into the room; almost an irrelevancy. She looked up. The arched ceiling, two metres above her head, was white. To the left, the plain, clinical walls were the same.

She was a ghost.

A non-entity.

And as the sickly-sweet smell of lilies suffused the room, she looked at the orderly (Dr Phyl Laforge, MArcTher), and knew that he was mourning the loss of his wife to him.

And she wondered at the choice of words.

~'/|\'~

The vast flatscreens, mounted against the walls of the interior of the steel canyon that was London-2, blared out their approved message, on every channel. The current channel showed a very attractive Nazzadi, her hair dyed snow white to match her facial tattoos, in what might be generously called a skimpy dress.

"The latest news; the defeat of the latest strike in the Aeon War deployed against the valiant New Earth Government forces on the European front, against London-2. Although the New Earth Government has made no official statements, highly placed sources have stated, off the record, that they believe the vehicle, a bipedal walker roughly seventy metres in height, to have been of Dagonite origin."

Misato snorted in a rather unladylike manner. She knew very well that the "highly placed sources" were the official briefing, at least at first. She shivered, and wrapped her arms tighter around her HEV suited body. The recovery attempts upon the dead entity, now codenamed by the New Earth Government as "Asherah", were going as planned, and Ritsuko was positively delirious at the fact that they had a (nearly) intact corpse to poke around in. She had over-heard her old friend talking with some of the NEG scientists poking around in the innards of the beast, and the words "non-euclidean", "extra-dimensional", and references to exceedingly complex mathematics were being thrown around far too casually. With signs of intense enjoyment, too.

While obviously better able to deal with such things than, say, her grandmother would have been, Misato Katsuragi still held that there were some things that man was not meant to know. Like, say, how to bend space in a way that parallel lines intersected and then start showing them to her.

Moreover, because Evangelion Unit 01 had still been an internal Ashcroft project, rather than a NEG Army project, she had been the ranking officer, as the individual formally in charge of the military affairs of Inner London. Now, normally she could have deputised someone to over see the project, and got back to filling in some of the paper work that accumulated, like flies on a carcass, on her in desk. She would actually have done it, too. It would have been preferable to spending time around here, with the Arcology wall punctured and the ever-so-pleasant British weather blowing in.

It was raining, despite all her experiences with such things as gravity, horizontally.

Someday, she swore to herself, she would hunt down and find the individual who had approved her promotion to Chief Operations Officer for the Foundation in London. And then she would have words. Words involving coldness, wetness, and being forced to listen to arcane scientists explain what they were doing for very long periods of time. It was clinically proven to drive you mad, after all; what more did they have to show to get it banned...

But maybe she could start with the idiot in the New Earth Government Army who had decided, after their failure to kill the Asherah entity, that they had to be seen to be doing someone big and brave and heroic. As a consequence, they'd sent a dammed O-8, a Marshal to oversee the operations. She'd only been an O-4, a Major, when she'd left the NEGA for the better pay working for the Foundation. As an individual in the odd legal status of being a member of the Foundation's state-within-a-state (and didn't they know it, she added silently, her mind substituting the name "Gendo Ikari" for "they" as soon as she thought it), she wasn't technically outranked, but her instincts were yelling at her to defer to him.

She ignored them. Reluctantly, she got up from her section behind the wind (and rain) shadow of a wrecked piece of wall, and went to get some more coffee. Coffee was warm. Warm was good.

That was the kind of maths that she approved of.

Unfortunately, the path to the nano-fabber set up for hot drinks was blocked by scientists. Talking science. And not even proper science; arcane science.

Approval rating dropping, she thought to herself.

As the black liquid came out of the machine into her waiting voice, she heard the unmistakable tones of Dr Atagi from over her shoulder.

"...so, yes, it seems that the entity, is, quite apart from protruding an extra-dimensional bubble which warps space-time in the same fashion as a massive body to an extent that we'd only really see this degree of the imposition of a non-Euclidean geometry around a singularity... oh yes, did I mention? The WEYL and RICCI tensors are themselves complex... I know! This thing should give research materials for years."

Ritsuko's voice dropped in enthusiasm, suddenly.

"And keep the whole damn psychiatric wards of the Foundation with a regular influx of patients, too."

Misato could feel the change in the atmosphere. Colder, suddenly, as if it had just dropped ten degrees. Was that a sniffle she heard? Yes, it was, she decided, and more than one.

She turned around. The flock of arcane scientists was already dispersing, leaving Ritsuko staring down at the ground.

She shuffled towards her friend, steaming cup of coffee in her hand, and a decidedly neutral expression on her face.

"Rits? You want a cup of coffee? It's black?"

Her friend grabbed at it, with a hungry, almost inhuman expression on her face.

She then downed it in one.

"Uh, that was very hot..." Misato began, before fading away.

Ritsuko was crying, her dyed blond face obscuring her face. She began to sob, a thick burble halfwhere between a sob and a giggle.

"Ow. Yeah." She pulled out a pack of cigarettes from within her HEV suit, and lit up.

"Gods, yeah. Ow. My tongue feels like, well, like the taste buds and the muscle itself have become scalded and engorged from the excess heat."

Misato looked at her wryly. "I think you meant "I burnt my tongue!" she replied, in a somewhat forced light-hearted tone of voice.

"Yes, sure."

"Are you sure you don't want to talk about it." Misato paused, a slightly stricter tone entering her voice. "Have you been going to your weekly evaluations? Have you been taking your pills?"

"Yes, Misato, I have." Her voice steadied somewhat. "It's just... well, the day before yesterday, I went to the Twin Obelisks. Some new names had gone up."

The black-haired woman didn't say anything, but merely hugged her friend around the shoulders. Of course, Misato thought. She tends to get like this when she goes near that place.

The Twin Obelisks. There were copies of them in any major Ashcroft Foundation facility, although the originals stood in the Foundation's headquarters, in Chicago-2. The larger White Obelisk, which, engraved upon it in minuscule text, listed the names of every single researcher and arcanotechnician lost to insanity, locked up in the permanent wards of the Foundation's cavernous mental facilities. And the Black Obelisk, listing every single individual killed directly in the line of their duties.

"It's just," Ritsuko, in a shaky voice, as she wiped her eyes on her sleeve, "it's just, well... the year before last, over half my graduating class in now on one of those two Obelisks. My mother's on the White one."

**NAOKO AKAGI**

"You remember Asuka, right, over in the German branch."

Misato nodded her assent.

"I heard this morning that they're putting Unit 02 off the training position its been in, since the funds were cut, and attaching it directly to the NEGA. Her mother was driven mad by the Evangelion project, and now..." Ritsuko clammed up.

**KYOKO ZEPPELIN SORYU**

"Hell, you know how I bitch about Dr Miyakame, but he's the only sane one left out of his entire research group. The rest are on the monoliths, one way or another. Simon Yi, the man who developed the D-Engine, is up there."

**SIMON YI**

"And then there's Teresa Ashcroft. She did all the theory, from scratch. She's responsible for all much modern technology. People in the past would have killed for the almost free energy, 100% environmentally sound..."

"Apart from when gribbly things burst out and eat the technicians." Misato bit down on her lip, well aware that her attempts to interject some humour into the situation might just make the situation worse.

"That only happened with the first few prototypes, back in the '30s, as you know quite well," Ritsuko snapped back, sounding more like herself. "But, anyway, what did that brilliance get Teresa Ashcroft..."

**TERESA ASHCROFT**

"Nothing, that's what. She was committed in '22, aged 27. If she's alive now, do you think she cares about anything at all." The doctor took a deep pull on her cigarette. "And that's just the White. I can name several more on the Black. You know the Ashcroft college we'll be sending the Third Child to. Almost all the children there have a parent on the Obelisks. That's what we're doing. The dammed D-Engine is eating up all our best and brightest, and spitting some out, mangled, while it swallows some whole."

Inside, Ritsuko Atagi was shaking. She realised, now, that she was having one of her episodes. She hadn't told her friend yet that they'd bumped her up to twice-weekly examinations. She was losing it, she knew. But still, all the people she knew were going slowly crazy. And what they were doing to get the Evangelions working. Sometimes, she doubted that the human race was worth what they were sacrificing for it. What she, personally, was sacrificing. It wasn't even going crazy, not really. Because when she looked at it through the new viewpoint that she got through arcanotechnology, it made more sense. What did human emotions matter when you knew, as a clear statement, that all humanity was was a collection of three-dimensional molecules arranged in a complex pattern, embedded in the fourth dimension, and with slight intrusions into the fifth. But whenever she wavered, out of the mists of her subconscious emerged that face. She would never be free of him.

She pulled herself together, internally, following her councillor's guidance. There were a lot of things that Misato both shouldn't (both for the reasons of their friendship and the classified nature of the information) and couldn't (unable to understand from her limited perspective) know, and she would not blab it out to her. She took several deep breaths.

"Don't you have to collect the Third Child from the hospital, anyway? He was assigned to you." She looked at her friend's face, her eyes still red and damp. "What did you think of him? Before he got in the Evangelion, obviously; they haven't given him a full analysis yet for mental contamination or any of the... problems we had with previous candidates."

Misato gave a dark look at her friend.

"Don't remind me. I kind of liked him, which is a good start. No tolerance for motion sickness, of course, but you said that the Representative is the same."

Her friend laughed weakly, her voice still shaky. "Misato, remember Pola? The fighter pilot. He only let you drive him around twice before he left. You know, I think you burned out your vestibular system right when you joined the NEGA."

Misato looked blank at her for a few seconds.

"Oh. You mean I-N-N-E-R space E-A-R, I think." Inside, she felt somewhat better. If Ritsuko could needle her by the use of too long words, then she was getting better.

"Yes, Misato, I do." She pulled a handkerchief out of her suit, and blew her nose, noisily.

"Not my fault I was assigned an Eclipse as my first mecha," the black-haired woman added in a deliberately childish voice.

"What happened to Pola, anyway. I thought you quite liked him, back in college."

Misato shrugged "He was only really a handkerchief after Kaji."

"Handkerchief? Ah, something to sob into, then discard."

"Well, actually I meant it in the sense that it's only good for a few blows, but your version can be safely explained to children. But, yes, he ended up being moved over to Shanghai from Tokyo-3." Her voice went cold. "He was probably still there when the Rapine Storm hit China."

Words were not necessary to explain what that meant. The human Disciples, if the term could apply to those degenerates, would rape you to death, eat you and wear your skin as clothing. These actions could even be re-arranged, without nearing some of the worse things that they could do, things that weren't even released to the general public.

"Look at us," Ristuko said, in a black tone of voice. "We're in our mid thirties..."

"Early thirties!" Misato replied, in a hurt tone of voice. "I'm still thirty two!"

"Thirties, then. So many people we know are dead. Dead in this stu... this war."

"Yes, yes," she replied, her voice shifting into a more authoritative tone of voice. "For your own sake, Rits-chan, I'm formally, as Director of Operations, giving you sick leave. I'm going to the Charing Cross Hospital to pick up the younger Ikari. I'll drive you there, and leave you at the out-clinic. You can't work in this state, and you won't help up if you have a break-down like this when the Evangelions are active."

Ritsuko sniffed. "You're right. You know, you might actually be maturing." A weak smile covered her face. "As I can recall, in university it was me driving you to hospital, to have your stomach pumped..."

A pained look entered Misato's eyes. "That hurt. Man, my twenty-second birthday sucked..."

"Among other activities, yes."

"That was low, Rits, that was low."

"As low as you went shortly before you tried rock-paper-scissors with absinthe? And, before you ask why I'm bringing this up, I still haven't forgiven you for what you did to my carpet."

Clutching her rather tattered dignity around her, Director of Operations Misato Katsuragi stalked off to her car, scientist in tow.

~'/|\'~

It was three days before they released Shinji from the in-clinic. He felt better, now. A full psychological profile, of the same level assigned to Engel pilots, had been generated, and he had been subject to eight sessions of talk therapy. They'd prescribed him a course of prochlorperazine, a mild relaxant, which should help with his still elevated nerves. He had been deemed stable and sane, capable of normal activities within society, and, he noted with a hint of displeasure, fully able to operate a standard NEG Sword-class mecha. He wasn't sure how that related to ability to climb into an entry pod, and he wasn't really sure if the psychiatrists knew, either, but he knew that what this meant was that they would pretty inevitably try to make him pilot the Evangelion again.

Well, if they thought that he merely acquiesce, subject to the blackmail of the White xenomix and her physical state and the demands of his father, then they didn't know Shinji Ikari. He knew the law. The New Earth Government required all mecha pilots (excluding certain civil-assigned power armours, defined as D-Engine powered vehicles subject to the Operator Side Effect less than 3.5 metres in height) to have a commission, and they didn't usually accept candidates before age of eighteen. The New Earth Government couldn't legally deploy him. He was vaguer on the somewhat extra-judicial nature of the Ashcroft Foundation and their operations, but he wasn't an employee of the group, and so they had no authority over him when he was outside of one of their facilities.

He smiled faintly. The Ashcroft Foundation. So much like the historical papacy of Historical Christianity, with its own authority and its whispering voice in the ear of the powerful. And, in the faint whispers on the grapevine of society, just as willing to sacrifice a martyr for them.

On the other hand, though, it seemed that they really needed him, to the extent that they would fly him from Japan to pilot the Engel. He was sure that his father would find a way to make him do it. The name of Ikari bore its own baggage; that of the _eminence grisé_.

Shinji was quite unaware of how true that was.

And anyway, there was the guilt, that he was needed, and to run away was... well, against his social conditioning, for the protection of the tribe. The very fact that he could articulate the thought, that the desire make grandiose gestures "For Humanity's Sake!" was merely biological programming designed to subjugate the mind of the individual to the collective good didn't make the sick, roiling feeling in his stomach, when he considered the so-called cowardice, go away. What to do, what to do?

As his mind ran over these problems, Shinji's body removed the clothing he had been assigned in the mental health hospital. He looked out over the clothes that they had given him to wear. His white shirt and black trousers had been destroyed, he had been told, by the immersion in the LCL.

The question to what that would do to his health in the long term was a nagging itch at the back of his head.

As a replacement, they had given him a generic light blue T-shirt, and dark grey trousers. They were obscured, though, by the ballistic vest. Its black mass lay under the white lights of the sterile room he was in, soaking in the light. He had been told by the orderly who had laid this clothing out that, as pilot, he was obliged to wear this in all places not deemed secure. Apparently he was now a potentially valuable assassination target for Migou infiltrators, Dagonite cultists, malcontent, and possibly even people who might view the late deployment of the Evangelion as the failure of the NEG to save their loved ones.

Not a happy thought at all.

Outside the gleaming entrance to the facility, in a courtyard filled with flowers under the artificial sun, a figure waited for him. As his eyes cleared from the unusual brightness, Shinji was somewhat surprised to find that the Foundation's Director of Operations waiting for him.

With, he shuddered, her car. That loathsome machine, that was merely a tool for her deep seated desires to make perfectly innocent individuals suffer. That finely bladed weapon that was the way that her desires to be a pilot (again, he judged, looking at her posture) could be made manifest. Many fears have been attached to objects in the past; a fear of uncontrolable attached to alcohol, a fear of the unknown attached to mimes, a fear of the unseen attached to shadows. Shinji Ikari was far too logical, in his own mind, to displace fears like that. No, what truly terrified him was the car, specifically when it was in motion. And when the individual greeting him was driving it.

"Hello... uh... Misato," was all that he could get out, past the waves of nausea and fear. "I... uh... thought that I was just going to be collected by ... someone less important than yourself." He paused. He would not hyperventilate, he would not faint. "What will... uh... be happening to me now?"

Misato smiled at him, in a slightly desperately hopeful way. She didn't have much experience with children (though Shinji wasn't really a child. On the other hand, he wasn't even born in the '70s, and she was damned if someone who couldn't wasn't really a child, because that would make her old), and it had just been her luck that had resulted in her accommodation being selected from among the few with the appropriate security for such a high value target. She had volunteered for that list, true, but that had just meant that she had got a bigger apartment up in London-2, and a small Foundation funded tax rebate. She hadn't expected them to actually use it, damn it, beyond possibly a nice, sober officer who could maybe help with the tidying. She hadn't expected Rits' Evangelion project to ever a) bear fruit, and b) land her with one of the pilots as a flatmate. Especially since they'd already told her, in private, that if they had to move Unit 02 over to London, she'd be getting yet another visitor.

The fact that, unbeknownst to her, her psychological profile had been noted to "have deep rooted, unfulfilled maternal tendencies", had also helped narrow the choice, when the first choice for supervision and guardianship of the pilots had refused to have his son living with him.

"I've been appointed your legal guardian. You're an important military figure now, after your success against the first Herald... you do know that we're calling them that, right?" Misato flapped her hand. "Doesn't matter, anyway, silly name if you ask me. Anyway, I've got a big apartment, and one of the few in the entirety of London-2 that fit the security criteria. I volunteered."

Well, it wasn't technically a lie. She did have a big apartment, it did fit the security criteria, and she supposed that she had sort of volunteered when she filled in that form when Ritsuko had pointed out that it seemed like an easy way to get preferential treatment. It wasn't the boy's fault that she was being forced into it.

"What about Yuki and Gany?"asked Shinji, referring to his foster mothers back in Tokyo-3.

"They agreed, said that they couldn't really legally guard you while you were in London-2. I'm sorry, I meant to collect you three days ago, but they wouldn't let you out before they'd given you the full works. Anyway," she continued, brushing quickly past the sensitive subject whatever had happened in the psychiatric facility, "It'll be fun, honestly. I'll go out and get food, so there'll be no need to cook anything from the nanofab. We'll have a welcoming party!"

Shinji paused. He wasn't even sure that he wanted to stay here, let alone go anywhere near that monstrous Engel they wanted him to pilot, and here was this woman barging into his life, taking it over, and dragging him off, importantly, in her devil-forged car.

"Excellent," Misato declared, grabbing him by the elbow and pulling. "I've put in a form to have the rest of your stuff shipped over. I doubt anyone could have enough stuff to fill up my place."

Shinji, for his part, was merely running to keep upright. How the hell could that woman move so fast? Did she have little A-Pods in her feet?

~'/|\'~

Lieutenant James Hawass, known to his co-pilots as "Tragedy" sat beside his wife's bedside, the bleep of the hospital machine unheard. His olive skin was grey with fatigue and stress, his hair lank, his posture bowed. He'd sent his daughter back, to stay with her friends. It wasn't much, or even the right thing to do, but it was the only thing that he could think to do.

Dammit! It wasn't fair.

It wasn't meant to like this.

He'd helped kill the Herald, felt its finger fill the gullet of his Auphan, while the new Evangelion class tore it apart. He'd helped save London-2. He was getting a commendation for this.

Except it was now just meaningless. He'd come home to find his daughter sitting in the corner, hands clutched over her eyes, crying, while his wife lay motionless on the floor, in a pool of her own vomit. That wasn't the worst of it.

She'd clawed her own eyes out.

She'd clawed her own fucking eyes out.

And now he sat, the big damn hero, saviour of the New Earth Government, by her bedside. She was tied down, with the full in-patient treatment to stop any extra damage.

The doctors had said that they could fix the physical damage. A new set of cloned eyes could be grown; that'd take a few days, and then maybe a fortnight of recovery while her brain got used to it. No, it was the mental damage that would be the problem. They'd said that this was Aeon War Syndrome, which just made it worse for the Engel pilot, who knew what that really was.

Somehow, Katrina, his beautiful wife, had been exposed to something that should not be. He'd seen things like that, and killed them. Hells, he sat in a uterine pod inside something that man was not meant to know, and used it as a tool. That was fair. He knew the risks when they offered him the surgery to get the Engel Synthesis Interface. He was a volunteer.

But what had she been doing wrong? She wasn't an arcanotechnician or an occult scholar. The OSI had already torn up the house, and they'd found no sign of sorcery. She'd been genescanned; one human female of Caucasian/Indian sub-continent origin, no Outsider Taint. She had no previous records of parapsychic abilities.

It wasn't meant to happen to people like that.

But it did. All too frequently. And so he was left to sit here, waiting. He'd seen friends, comrades, in a less bad state, who had taken years to get out of the in-clinic.

God-fucking-damn it. It wasn't fair.

All over the city of London-2, and the rest of Europe to a lesser degree, the same melancholy tale had repeated itself like a sick joke. A mysterious wave of madness had swept through the populace like a dark tide, leaving most unaffected, but dragging some poor, hapless souls into its malevolent vortices where few surfaced. Average people and businessmen; the majority of the populace of the New Earth Government mostly survived untouched, with but a few suffering disturbed nights, and a slightly increased death rate in local hospitals, as those already weakened succumbed to the darkness that lurks behind eyes other than theirs. Some ran screaming from their workplaces, and ran to the nearest bodies of liquid, to cast themselves in, claiming that they must walk the waters to placate that which awakes. The scientists, of both the mundane and the arcane, sorcerer and biologist alike, oddly, were affected less, with most feeling no difference. Perhaps the pursuit of logical thought had in some way inured them to the ripples in the pool behind the senses, where it is all put together. But it was the artists; DJs, painters, and dancers who suffered the worst. In one strip-club, specialising in the Nazzadi, the workers fell upon the clientèle, consuming them in a madness that seemed quite beyond what many of the sickened OIS Agents, who put down the mad souls, had seen before. Painters produced masterworks beyond their skills, with sickening words in Aklo, R'lyehan and Tsath-yo that proclaimed profuse truths about the universe. And scultors made figures cast in bronze, clay and tin, that portrayed a morbid, yet horrifically gravid, vaguely female figure, like a Stygian Medusa stripped of all the romance of myth.

And in a blacked room, under stars which were wrong, a figure, cast in white light, nodded to Gendo Ikari.

"You know what must be done. You cannot back out now. The Human Iteracy Project comes above all. For the Greater Good."

The figure vanished.

And the glint of the eyes behind the orange glasses spoke of the plans of the Ikaris. The Old Men had their plan, and he would follow his.

~'/|\'~


	3. Chapter 3: All Alike in Circumstance

**Chapter 3**

**All Alike in Circumstance**

~'/|\'~

The earth shook as the beast strode through the bombed out ruins of Old London. A black silhouette, its over-long arms dragging along the ground, as it casually smashed its way through an apartment block. And then it roared, a thin keen, impossibly loud, like a kettle fit to boil seas. The streets were abandoned; those among the squatters dwelling in the ruins who could seek asylum in the Enclaves had done so, while those who feared the scrutiny of the New Earth Government hid themselves in those parts of the Underground that had not flooded.

Target 0005-T was the latest iteration of the Herald-substitute for use in the Evangelion training programme. The direct data derived from the Third Herald, Asherah, had been deemed fully unsuitable for use in training, as the simulation body lacked the filtering effect that helped maintain the sanity of the pilot. The idea that an Eva pilot might be reduced to insanity by a training exercise had been duly considered, and had been deemed enough of a threat that such measures had been put in place. Why this was the case was only known to a number of individuals in the Ashcroft Foundation that could be counted on both hands. It had been justified to the NEG, however, by the little truth that it was considerably cheaper to run a simulation body than a full operation with Unit 01.

Up in the control centre, Misato frowned, and stroked the golden badge of a Major, restored to her shoulder. The operations staff of the Eva Project were, without exception, former officers in the NEGA; after the defeat of the Herald, the Project had been assimilated into the military with almost indecent speed, given the same odd status as the Engel Project. Ritsuko had been crowing about that; not only were they separate, as opposed to subordinate, to the Engels, but, as head scientist on the project, she was, technically in the eyes of the New Earth Government, possessing the same status as Dr Miyakame. She was getting a little intolerable, actually. Misato made a mental note to ...no, it was better than her depression, far better.

She mentally shrugged, and focussed back on the operation.

"Shinji. You have full control... now."

From the main screen, and the three-dimensional projection in the centre of the room, the control room watched the training of the Third Child. Two projections were up; the first, and larger, showed a model of the environment the alleged Unit 01 was supposedly operating in. The second showed the activities of the simulation body, suspended in fluid. The simulation bodies lacked most of the components that made the Evangelions unique; in practice, the bodies were closer to scaled up Engels. They were mostly unarmoured, only covered enough to help the sanity of the maintenance technicians, and, were they to be removed from the Pribnow Box, strategic removal of muscles and ligaments would leave them barely able to stand. Indeed, the fact that they could remain upright was a worrying situation in both Foundation and NEG contingency planning; despite the lobotomisation of the synthetic organisms, the regeneration that conventional Engels (although not Synthorgs derived from... whatever the Evangelions were) displayed was enough of a theoretical threat that the defences turned in around the simulation chamber rivalled that of front-line bases.

Shinji squatted behind a wrecked front of houses, his (or was it his? No, it wasn't. It was the Evangelion's body. He was just borrowing it)...

_Back in the control room, First Lieutenant Aoba frowned. The synch ratio was dropping. He input a series of commands, silently, and the drop ceased. He nodded, once, to himself._

_Ritsuko nodded, too. She'd noticed his activities, even though he hadn't unnecessarily announced them. Aoba was a good technician; he had great patience, kept his temper cool (unlike some people in the control centre), was doggedly determined, and had an especially good eye for detail. He wasn't as gifted a scientist as Maya, though, and his dress and habits were... annoying._

...blue-grey arms cradling the 120mm High Velocity Penetrator they'd given him. This was his second week of training, although the first ten days had been a very cut down version of base camp, teaching him to hold a rifle properly, use cover (although the concept of cover for a war machine forty metres high at the shoulders was rather different from that for a man-sized target, so they'd had him in a stripped down conventional mecha, with its control scheme modified to match that of the Eva), and generally some much abbreviated tools of the trade of the modern soldier. The training sergeant, a grim faced man who claimed that his entire body had been replaced over the course of the Aeon War, had groaned and told Shinji that he was useless at first sight, but he had been told by one of the assistants that the sergeant said that to everyone. Then there had been two days, filled with endless repetitions of the tedious phrase "Centre the rifle on the target and pull the trigger." Only yesterday had they actually let him engage in combat simulations, against a varied group of enemies that all seemed to be built around the same template as the Evangelion and the Herald.

"Remember the HUD," Shinji muttered to himself. "Watch the map. Remember the HUD. Centre the reticule and pull the trigger."

The Herald's footsteps stopped. The HUD showed that it was five hundred metres away, and he'd chosen this position well. The building in front of him was solid, but the area beyond that had been flattened by a Nazzadi strike, he assumed, and so he had a good field of fire. He straightened up, levelling the rifle on the target, and focussing the head-mounted lasers, and squeezed the...

... and a blue-green beam of light yawned out of the creature's mouth, punching through the building and his (no, the Evangelion's, he reminded himself) body. As the first of the magnetically accelerated Penetrators hit the target, it jerked, knocked back, as its night-black body, resplendent of cthonic depths, was torn apart.

Unfortunately, all that did was cause the beam to arc upwards, cutting through the body and neatly bisecting the human war machine. Shinji felt a slight ache, the faintest hint of the agony that such an injury would cause him if he were a proper Evangelion. The lights in the entry capsule went out, leaving him in complete darkness, in the dense, warm viscosity of the LCL. It still wasn't a nice taste, of blood and other, stranger, undertones, but he was getting used to it.

The lights clicked back on, showing the projected image of what the inside of the entry tube would look like, were it not flooded with reddish-orange goo.

Misato's voice came in, over the radio. She was definitely in "Officer Misato" mode, rather than the indolent, empty-headed, hedonistic, lazy, lowbrow (and Shinji could go on) slob which she seemed to really be.

"So, Pilot Ikari. What do you think you did wrong this time."

Was that the faintest hint of sadistic glee, like that from his cello teacher, who enjoyed the shouting at a student who had made a mistake almost as much as he praised one who did it correctly? He suspected it was. How could one woman be such a different person from one moment to the next. He vaguely wondered if it were possible to "save up" seriousness and responsibility. If so, Misato was obviously following a Keynesian economic policy.

He blinked heavily.

"I think I waited too long. I was waiting for it to pass me, then I was going to open fire. I didn't realise this was a new type. I thought it was the same as the second one you used against me..."

"...which was, in itself, stupid. You can't fight the next war against the last opponents, and we noticed in the last few simulations that you were relying upon knowing what they were going to do."

"That's why we programmed in the mutator," Dr Akagi added. "This was the first test of it. And I have to say, we did rather well," she said, a smirk emerging in her voice. "It takes the behavioural patterns of the observed Herald, all NEG, Nazzadi, Migou and Dagonite mecha, as well as various extra-normal lifeforms, and develops hybrid attack patterns. Moreover, its weapons are randomised, too, and subjected to a learning algorithm."

"But I can't even use the AT-field when in this thing," Shinji protested. "That's not really that fair."

"It's not fair, is it, Pilot Ikari? Would you like me to make a complaint to the Heralds?"

"But how can I train with the AT field, if I can't actually use it? Perhaps you would like me to practice flying in this flightless simulator?"

"We haven't resolved the issues with mounting enough A-pods on the Evangelion to actually achieve flight, but it does account for the jump pods. As you showed us so very well on trial zero-zero-three, when you managed to jump over the target and land in the Thames." Dr Akagi paused. "Well, when I say you landed in the Thames, I meant that your flaming wreckage did. Inertial trajectories and momentum are that ever so great bane of the hot-shot mecha pilot, and that just made you an easy target."

Shinji paused. "Point accepted. There was no need to be so pointlessly sarcastic, though," he added, in a slightly hurt voice.

He was fairly sure that he was just putting it on.

"English is a good language for being sarcastic in. Would you like to make a complaint to the Ashcroft Foundation?"

"Point also accepted, Doctor." Shinji smiled wryly. "Nazzadi is a lot more pleasant in that regard," he added in that language.

"If you have finished with your all-so-clever banter," Misato interrupted, "and, yes, I do realise that I am being sarcastic too... no, I could see you open your mouth, Rits-chan, don't even start that sentence." She cleared her throat. "We have a Pilot to train, so that, in real life, he doesn't get bisected by one of the Heralds. Perhaps we could get back to that."

Ritsuko nodded her head.

"Anyway, yes, to answer the question you initially put, Shinji, you seem to have natural talent at projecting an AT field. What we really need to do is to teach you to use the basics of Unit-01; movement, integrated and external weapons, cover. We'll be running live tests when Pilot Ayanami recovers, and we can pit the two Units against each other." She shrugged. "Depends if we can work out an attack pattern for the Heralds. If they attack all over the world, we may have to split the Evangelions up. Really, the political pressure to station one in Chicago would be too much. After all, Miyakame's precious Engels can't do anything to a Herald-level entity; they're too small, too weak, and use inferior genestock."

Misato gave a meaningful cough.

"Anyway, yes. Maya, begin a full program restart. Randomise starting location and feed the new data into the mutator."

The control room swung into life once again.

~'/|\'~

Shinji clambered out of the opened door to the entry port, and immediately threw up, emptying his stomach of a rancid mixture of LCL and breakfast.

He groaned. He was feeling physically exhausted from the training, despite his body (or was it? No, this was certainly his body.) having done nothing more strenuous than sit in a chair all day, with the pseudo-weightlessness of the fluid in the chamber even removing the necessity to hold his own weight. Perhaps that was part of the problem, he thought to himself. Getting out, and that horrible moment when the tube replaced the LCL with air, just made what seemed like gravity had tripled. And it seemed so cold outside the Entry Plug. He was sure that the London Geocity was kept around five degrees colder than London-2, above them.

He felt one of the technicians take his arm, guiding him gently over the patch of vomit. They had got quite used to that happening; about half the time he threw up, and those incidents coincided with times that he swallowed the stuff. He wasn't quite clear what the LCL actually was, and, frankly, he suspected he didn't want to know. Logically, it was probably related to amniotic fluid, given the whole immersion thing and the biological nature of the Eva-class Engels, which was a thought which had the word squick attached to it.

Indeed, the fact that he had just thought that thought was making him feel somewhat worse. Stupid mind making stupid logical connections.

Someone had just passed him a towel. That was a good thing, he thought, as he wiped his face, and made it so he wasn't dripping wet, and turned to thank his potential saviour. It was Kozo Fuyutsuki, his father's henchman and second-in-command of Ashcroft Europe. The old man, clad in his brown suit, actually seemed to be trying to be nice; at the very least, he was smiling, and, of course, he had provided the towel.

"Pilot Ikari. You did well in the training today; better than yesterday. You're learning rapidly."

"Th... thank you, sir," Shinji managed to stammer in return. With surprise, he found he was oddly nervous around the man. Nothing compared to the cold presence of his father, but there was something slightly unsettling about the man, as if Gendo had rubbed off on him.

And, of course, praise from an authority figure felt good. He knew that it was an ingrained instinct, a legacy of the fact that people who didn't settle for just praise from authority tended not to breed, and of the social structures of the apes before mankind, but it did.

"After you've changed out of the plug suit, the Representative... your father wants to see you in his office, to discuss the terms of your employment here."

Shinji nodded silently.

Fuyutsuki turned to leave, stopped, and, not quite looking at Shinji, said, "That was well done, Shinji."

The boy frowned, staring at the man's retreating back, towel in hand. This contemplation was broken by Misato snatching it from him, and beginning to vigorously dry his LCL-soaked hair.

"Aaah! What are you doing! Stop...Mmmph" he complained, as his plaintive protests only succeeded in getting an orange-goo soaked towel in his mouth. He tried to squirm away, but the woman was horribly fast and strong.

"You really did improve faster after Ritsuko put in the mutator. For the last few ones, you were really moving as if it was your body. With luck, we'll get permission for some field tests soon," said Happy Misato happily. "And stop struggling. We don't want you dripping LCL all the way to the changing rooms."

"But when you do this to it, before it gets washed out, it just ends up sticking all over the ... mmmph," the reply once again interrupted by the taste of towel.

Misato sighed.

"Very well," she said, handing the by-now sodden towel back to Shinji. "Go. Clean up, then you can see the Representative."

She noted the slump of his shoulders as he walked away.

Behind her, Ritsuko and Maya stood silently, on their way back to the offices of the Evangelion Project. Ritsuko, she knew, was judging her. Misato could feel it from the way that she didn't say anything, from her pose that screamed that she wasn't just not saying anything, but that _she wasn't saying anything_.

But Dr Akagi was most certainly thinking. And what she was thinking was;

"That psychological profile was right on the money. Looks like I owe Dr Tam 20 Tn."

Maya Ibuki was less skilled, or less prepared to keep quiet than her mentor and teacher.

"How does he do it? How does he bring himself to pilot it?" she asked, softly.

Whether the question was rhetorical, or directed towards Ritsuko or Misato was unclear. Nevertheless, the good doctor took it upon herself to answer.

"It's complicated. It's in part ignorance. We know the truth about what the Evangelions are, and importantly the fact that the numbers of the Children only count the successful candidates. If we counted all of them; well, let's just say that the Second Child would be actually in the double digits, and he'd be even higher."

She paused, her face lowered in the pure white light of the hallway, staring at the reddish-orange footprints on the white floor.

"And it's his personality. He has an outer shell of cynicism and sarcasm, but he'll go along with what others say eventually. The complaints, inconvenient questions and objections are just a way to make it seem like he has control over the situation, without having to make decisions himself. It's how he copes with life."

Because you're so different, her inner voice sneered. You're the facilitator, the one who hammers others' dreams into reality, paying for their flights of fantasy with your grip on sanity. He's bright and he asks questions, instead of just obeying, like most of the people around here. You don't know that he'll obey no matter what.

Because asking questions is such a good idea, another voice replied. If Teresa Ashcroft hadn't asked all those questions and read _The Mysteries Within_, and Simon Yi hadn't asked all those questions about what exactly had driven his colleague mad, and so on to the current day, the Migou wouldn't have come. Were the five-and-a-half billion lives from the two Arcanotech Wars really fair exchange for the knowledge.

"Senpai?" There was a tone of worry in Maya's voice. "Are you okay? You just tailed off."

"Yes. I am fine." Her voice came out, cold as ice.

The voices were silenced by a nootropic mood stabiliser, swallowed without the aid of water.

Misato stared coldly at her old friend's retreating back. The Aeon War Syndrome was getting worse with Ritsuko, she thought. The insanities and mental disorders, worrying though they were, were human problems. They were human ways which humans used to cope with things that they shouldn't have to; Ritsuko had her delicate mental stability, and her horde of cats. But the coldness, the apathy, the dehumanisation that some people showed (like the Representative, her mind whispered to herself, within its deepest depths), was worse. Because those people were stable, but their equilibrium point was not that of normal people.

~'/|\'~

Gendo's breath rose before him, in the chill room at the top of the geocity. He stared at his second-in-command over his glasses.

"You talked to him."

It was a statement of fact, not a question.

"Why do you make these statements, if you already know the answers?"

There was no answer.

"You are nervous, aren't you, Gendo."

It was also a statement.

"You've closed in on yourself rather than show nerves ever since I've known you. You've preferred to be seen as a magnificent bastard, as the chessmaster, than a human being, ever since it happened. Since they happened, actually."

Gendo ignored his words, and spoke softly, as if the criticism had not occurred.

"Misato was told to evaluate his performance honestly to him. You praised him, as we planned. Ritsuko made the last few easier than they should have been, deactivating the learning algorithm."

A faint smirk appeared under the glasses.

"Honestly, Gendo. You shouldn't feel so proud about setting things up so a sixteen year old signs a contract," Fuyutsuki chided, gently.

"Not a normal sixteen-year old, no. But this is imperative for the YI-plan. It must happen."

"True, true."

~'/|\'~

Shinji took his shower while in the plug suit itself. The garment was sealed around the neck, after all, keeping the rest of him dry and clean. He knew, intellectually, that the thing was cleaned in a high technology facility every time it was worn, but it just felt better to leave it superficially clean. He raised his head to the ceiling, eyes closed, and let the warm water wash down upon his face. Unseen, the rivulets of water and other fluids flowing off the suit swirled together, staining the drain red, and making it look like an ancient film, which had almost died from the public consciousness. All that was remembered by most was the music, a shrieking violin tune, and the image of blood on white tiles.

Fortunately, Shinji managed to complete the shower without any unfortunate stabbing incidents. Leaving the plug suit on the hook intended for it, he caught the eye of his reflection in the mirror. He stared at himself, as he pulled up his trousers, and did up the ballistic vest and shirt.

_Who is the boy looking at me from the mirror?_

_Well, obviously, I know it's me. But who is me._

_Yes, that question can also be answered by the word "me". But that's trivial, trite and a bit pointless, like some overblown pseudobabble, of the type that Yuki had always been a bit intolerant of. Has. She's still alive after all. I mean, I only saw her less than three weeks ago._

_But why do I feel like I'll never see her again. Who'd have thought that I'd end up being dragged to England, almost killed, and then essentially blackmailed by my bastard of a father into piloting a humongous mecha._

_Let's start with the basics. My name is Shinji Ikari._

He unconsciously smoothed his hair down, while staring at his own face.

_I am ethnically Japanese. I am looking rather pale, more so than usual. I am one metre, seventy two centimetres tall. I am thin, and rather lacking in muscles. My hand is covered in grey, blue, black and whitish armour plating._

_What the hell! That isn't right at all!_

Shinji stood, staring and blinking at his hand (was it his hand? It looked like the hand of the Evangelion, the one he had been using all day). He flexed one finger. The hand before him flexed the same finger. He slowly transferred his gaze to the mirror. The hand in that appeared normal.

_Well, that's reassuring. I'm not turning into the Evangelion, or some horrific, extra-dimensional being. I'm just going mad._

_Wait a moment. That's only reassuring in the sense that... dammit, I can't even think up a good metaphor._

_If I close my eyes_, he thought, in the dreamy sense of terror that was now overtaking him, _it might go away. If it goes away, I might have just dozed off. I mean, I'm feeling rather tired from the last two weeks, with no days off. Yes, it's a nightmare. Therefore, if I close my eyes, and then open them suddenly, that will wake me up. And if it's still there, then I think I'll start by screaming."_

He closed his eyes.

Rubbing his fingers together, they felt like flesh, warm and yielding, rather than hard and cold advanced composites. That was probably a good sign.

He opened them again.

The hand was back to normal, if it had ever been otherwise. Human flesh, with human skin, bitten nails, and long, thin fingers.

_Have my fingers always been like that? The hand looks thinner, somehow, possessing of more finesse._

He compared it to the other one. It was identical to its chiral twin. He also noticed that he was lying down on the floor of the changing rooms. He didn't remember falling.

_No, I was just creeping myself out. I'm fine. My hands are fine. Everything is fine._

Rapidly, Shinji checked that he was, in fact, fully clothed (an important deed, after the incident with the bath), and left the changing room as quickly as he could. It had just been a nightmare, after he collapsed with exhaustion. He wasn't going to tell anyone about that. Actually no, he would tell them in the next mandatory counciling session. Yes, it would be logical that you might have dreams about being in the Eva-class; after all, if he understood Dr Akagi right, with a synchronisation ratio of over fifty percent (which he had been keeping rather consistently, a warm little thought linked to her mixed admiration and perplexed rage that such a thing was possible), it was at least as much your body as your normal one. Yes, he could tell them then, and it would be a bad dream, not real.

And in the upper corner of the mirror above the sink, seen by none, an imprint of a pair of lips, marked by condensed breath, faded into non-existence, as if they had never been.

They would leave no DNA evidence, no layer of the oils that human skin carries. Perhaps they _had_ never been.

Perhaps.

~'/|\'~

Gendo Ikari stared at his son from across his elaborate desk. The walls had been set to black, the dome arching overhead invisible outside the pools of light on the floor. The room appeared as nothing less than an open area on a clouded, moonless night, or, alternatively, depending upon your mode of thought, a vast, cosmic egg.

That mode of thought was possessed by Gendo Ikari. That thought made him smile on the inside.

He stared at his son across the desk, even though the only kin that he would acknowledge in public was genetic. The boy took after Yui in appearance, too. Another thing that drove a wedge between them, though Shinji would not know of it. Could not know of it, for they had been careful to destroy all the images of Yui they could.

And that had been difficult. The metanet was possibly one of the worst things ever for an individual trying to destroy all records of another's appearance. It had taken almost five years to get all of her social networking sites, and he was fairly sure that in some server, there was a back-up copy. It would not do, when the Evangelion Project went public as a separate entity to the Engel Project, for any images of her to be available. It would not do at all.

Shinji was tired, his father could see, and nervous, more so than usual in their infrequent encounters. They'd been working him hard, only slackening off just at the end to make sure that he was in a good enough mood to feel required, to feel proud of himself.

Pride, Gendo thought to himself. Such a wonderful tool. People are proud when they are praised, proud of what they can do, and proud of what they will refuse to do. Gendo had no time for pride. What he could, and would make time for was hubris. Because, when the facts of the universe were taken into account, what god deserves worship? What action is too extreme if it would save mankind from ancient species that care nothing for it, not even giving it good, honest, hatred.

"Shinji," he began. "You are wondering why you are here."

He got a nod in return.

"Remember when you first saw Unit 01. You said that I couldn't make you pilot it."

Shinji glared back at him. His father could tell that the boy wasn't letting himself speak. He was still bitter about the extortion (not blackmail, as that would involve the threatened revelation of secrets) of his services by the means of the injured Rei. She had suffered worse for Shinji's initial cowardice, Gendo knew, but he wasn't going to mention that.

You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, after all.

"I still cannot. You cannot be legally conscripted, due to the leaving age. You are the only other individual we have found that can pilot Unit 01. Pilot Ayanami can, too, but we only have one of her. Therefore, I will make you an offer."

Shinji perked up a little bit, staring at his father's eyes. Or, at least, where they would have been had they not been obscured by the glare on the orange glasses. Nevertheless, he held the gaze for a good five seconds, before shifting.

"What do you mean?"

"You will become a legal employee of the Ashcroft Foundation, as what will be formally classified as a "test pilot"."

Gendo lowered his hands from their steeped position, placing them together on his lap, behind the desk.

"You will continue your schooling at an Ashcroft academy as planned; the same one that Pilot Ayanami attends. They will account for the necessary absences for training, and ensure that it proceeds as uninterrupted as possible. You will remain a full-time student, or as close to that as can be achieved until the age of eighteen, when you would legally be able to leave school. The contract will be renegotiated at that time." Gendo paused. "Hopefully, you will only be deployed against Heralds, although that is one matter that I cannot guarantee."

Shinji coughed nervously. "Aa... why not?"

"Because the Project is now partially under the jurisdiction of the New Earth Government, and they could, within the limits I mentioned above, use the Evangelion Titan-class Engels as they wish."

"I suspect that they will not, however," added Fuyutsuki, right on cue. "The Evangelions are expensive to deploy, and not as battle-tested as the conventional mecha and Engels of the NEGA. Moreover, to be frank, they are piloted by people five years younger than the normal minimum." The old man smiled, somewhat wryly. "It would be a public relations [i]nightmare[/i] if we let any of you get killed."

Shinji frowned. "Why are you using sixteen year-olds, anyway? What makes me able to pilot an Evangelion, when the rest of the population cannot."

The question was directed towards Fuyutsuki, perhaps because he saw the older man as an easier target, more likely to answer truthfully, but his father intercepted it.

"Genetic factors. We believe that they're related to the ones that determine parapsychic abilities, although they, of course, have not been fully mapped. In fact, it might turn out to be a low level form of empathic talent; a form of Machine Empathy, one might say."

Gendo watched a faint glow of panic grow in his son's eyes. He could understand that. Parapsychics were treated in a manner similar to that members of socially unacceptable subgroups had been in a less enlightened time, with the fear of the different and of the unknown. The metaphor was imperfect, due to the fact that gays, for example, lacked the ability to set people on fire with their mind. In the more metropolitan cities they were tolerated at the very least, but in more backwards places, the force of social pressure was turned against them; social pressure somewhat stoked by the fact that the government and big companies were the most enthusiastic employers of the parapsychic community.

"This is merely a hypothesis, so you would not, under current laws be forced to register." The threat there was obvious, though veiled. "And, naturally, you would be paid well for your services. The salary would be 12000 Terranotes a month, after tax. Three thousand of that would be available at the time, with the rest paid into a trust fund I will have set up."

Shinji muttered something, seemingly to himself. Gendo continued, apparently not hearing him.

"You would not have to live with me; I have no time to look after anyone, and, frankly, feelings between us are bad enough that I believe that this would be for the best."

"Yes." That one word was spoken with a coldness that made the room seem like a tropical paradise.

"You will live, full-time with Major Katsuragi, who will be your guardian. If any more Pilots are found, they will also live there, unless they happen, by chance, to be already resident in London-2."

Gendo leaned forwards.

"So, I ask you. Will you do this. For the salvation of mankind?"

He watched Shinji massage his face with his hands. He wasn't even trying to hide his emotions; a mixture of nervousness, fear, anticipation, worry, and a myriad of other human weaknesses.

Shinji was torn in two by his father's sudden presentation. These were the most words that the man had spoken to him in twelve years, and he suddenly presented him with this, this mixture of incentives mixed with a threat.

Why was he doing this?

That, at least, was obvious. He wanted a pilot for his war machine. He wanted someone to get in it to kill things that shouldn't exist, and risk dying in the pursuit of the goal. But it was a good goal, after all. As a human, Shinji was very much in favour of the survival of humanity, and he included the Nazzadi in that category. They could produce fertile offspring, and that damn well made them the same species, despite the protests of the League for the Preservation of Nazzadi Culture.

And why the niceness... that wasn't the right word. Why was his father giving him an incentive to do this, rather than just demanding that he do it, and using a combination of emotional blackmail and whatever leverage he could find to ensure that Shinji got in the Evangelion?

Shinji realised that that had been a silly thought. It was a lot easier to give someone incentives to do something, to back up the guilt in what would have happened to both Pilot Ayanami and London-2, than just leave Shinji overly bitter against him. Well, that at the very least wasn't going to work. The man had abandoned him

_and shinji's mind flashed back to the image of a floor almost covered in opened cylinders white and smelling of hospitals and a dark shape in something white_

and he wasn't going to be forgiven. But at least he didn't seem to being actively malevolent, just... uncaring. And Shinji wouldn't have to live with him, which was something, especially since he had gotten Misato's apartment almost clean, now. And that was very good money for a sixteen year-old; for anyone. And, fundamentally, he could see that someone probably had to do it. They had the Heralds...

"One question. How many Heralds do you think there will be? Do you have any way of knowing when they'll come."

"To answer your _two_ questions," Gendo replied, putting a heavy emphasis on the number, "there will be more, although we don't know exactly how many. And we can track them through advanced reconnaissance units, and we believe that some satellites may be able to, although we didn't have any in the right position for Asherah."

That didn't actually answer anything, thought Shinji. But it can't be too many; after all, if only one has shown up (because they don't know if the satellites can track them), then they must be fairly infrequent. I mean, it would be implausible for too many to attack in too short a time, and if they did, then, well, I'm not sure how I killed that one, so if the conventional military is useless, then I'm dead anyway.

Shinji swallowed hard. "I'll do it."

~'/|\'~

After Shinji had signed the document, and been sent out, to be taken home by Misato, Fuyutsuki looked at his superior.

"You have secured the Third Child. You know why he's doing it, of course."

Gendo smiled. "Naturally. It's not just one thing, though. He's doing it because he's good at it, because he likes the way that the scientific team praise him, he still secretly wants praise from me, or at least any father figure, and, I suspect, the way that Dr Akagi glares at him for throwing out her theories on AT-field development, which match perfectly with the development patterns of the First and Second Children."

"You take a bit of pleasure from that, too."

"A bit. She gets too arrogant sometimes, and too consumed by her inferiority complex towards Miyakame. She needs some problems closer to home, to keep her away from the fevered dreams of the Nobel Prize in Arcanobiology. She doesn't really understand the different between a Type 1 EFCS and a Type 2, and the presence of Rei, who is neither, in her sample data just throws her out more."

"She is disconcerting, it is true."

"It is not her fault." Gendo sounded vaguely defensive. "Anyway, yes, the second reason is that he is a realist. He's seen the Third Herald. He's seen how the conventional forces failed against it. And he, although I didn't plan for it, saw it without the filtering level of the Evangelion. I'm very much surprised he stayed sane. The Heralds and their kin," his voice dripping with sarcasm, "have been known to seriously damage human mental health. We have the first examples of Aeon War Syndrome from the big incident that allowed us to find Baal Haddad."

Gendo shook his head.

"Yes, anyway, he knows that he's actually safer in the long run if he pilots the Evangelion. If the Second Child were here, he might not think so, but he doesn't know about her, and knows that Rei is too injured to fight. Call it the kind of cowardice that leads men to do amazing deeds, although, of course historically those individuals didn't have access to devices that cost a notable fraction of a region's GDP. There is the issue of Rei, too. When he first saw her, the biosensors picked up a notable change in his vitals. He showed all the signs of having seen her before, although that's impossible. The chromatic shift and the difference in age should have prevented a pattern match."

Gendo turned away from his former teacher, and began typing at his computer.

"The money is useful in the persuasion. He wouldn't do it just for that, but when given good reasons, then it becomes a sweetener, a deal-maker. Man is a very corrupt beast. If you wondered what he said, by the way..." Gendo, added, pressing a button on the computer built into the desk.

Shinji's muttering of "Carrot and stick" floated in the room, before being absorbed by its vastness.

"... then you can see he's right. He was able to notice that, at least."

"Was that a hint of pride?" Fuyutsuki asked, lightly.

Gendo frowned.

"No, it wasn't."

"I thought so," replied the white haired man, sighing. "I just furtively hoped that I was wrong."

~'/|\'~

Shockingly, Shinji managed to not fall asleep on the maglev trip back up, out of the Geocity and to Misato's apartment. He dragged his feet through the DNA scanner separating the two new Londons, aroused their suspiscion, and then got subjected to a brainwave scan, after they got it into their head that he might be under some kind of mental control. The scan had exposed extremely high levels of fatigue, and, after the apology for the fact that he had been wrestled to the ground, the municipal police had, after one look at the profile he had brought up, ordered a squad car to take him home.

Thanking them, he got through the extra blood test at the entrance to the AF-owned apartment complex, and made his way, falling asleep on his feet, to Misato's specific apartment.

The door slid open.

"Wark! Wark!"

Shinji smiled fuzzily.

"Hey, Pen-Pen."

The penguin was standing on the table, his wings, closer in appearance to feathered ape-like arms turning the pages of the newspaper. There was a pen held in his left "hand". His prominent red crest was standing upright.

Most people would have dismissed such a sight as a hallucination. Those individuals who resided with Misato could not take refuge in such sweet nepenthe, though, forced by the daily existence of her food to accept that there were things that man, truly, should not be permitted to know. Those who let her drive them anywhere added the seemingly non-Euclidean manoeuvres that she could subject an innocent product of Euro Wagon, and more importantly, the other passengers, to. That she had a pet (or as she called him, room-mate), seemingly sapient penguin, with a fondness for beer and the [i]Daily Telegraph[/i] crossword paled against such atrocities against life, physics and chemistry. It had been rumoured by Ashcroft employees that the New Earth Government had investigated her "Many-Meated Chow Mein Ramen Tababsco Tongue-Burner XXXtreme" (or as she called it, breakfast) for use as a chemical weapon, and rejected it as too cruel for use against even the Rapine Storm.

"Wark! Wark-wark-wark."

"No, sorry. No clue. Nothing of six then three letters," he replied after a pause.

Yes, and the penguin talks, Shinji thought, quite unaware to whom he was directing the comment. Himself he suspected, but frankly, he was tired enough that he wasn't sure if he existed, and that sentence didn't even make any sense. The penguin talks in penguin, and we hear him in penguin, but I hear him in Japanese, except when I think in English.

This makes no sense. And it's probably illegal.

Misato had, at some point between him leaving his room, and them leaving the house in the morning, found time to leave him a message on the bed, scrawled in somewhat childish handwriting on a piece of paper.

SHINJI

TODAY IS SUNDAY. YOU HAVE COLLEGE TOMORROW. SET YOUR ALARM FOR 7.

DON'T WAKE ME UP WHEN YOU GO, OR I WILL KILL YOU. AND I WON'T COOK ANTHING FOR YOU FOR A WEEK.

MISATO

Shinji frowned, fuzzily. Did that mean that she wouldn't cook for him after he was dead, or she would kill him with cooking, or she'd only cook for him a week after he died. He supposed that it was meant to be a threat, and noted it down, mentally.

"Wark! WARKARK!"

Pen-Pen poked his beak around the frame of the door. One... wing seemed to be holding a chessboard.

Shinji paused in the middle of slipping off the ballistic vest.

"No. No games. It might only be 7 pm, but I need to sleep. Bother Misato when she gets home."

The penguin disappeared, with only a disgruntled "wark" which didn't see fit to translate itself.

Shinji slept soundly that night, the sheer fatigue of the last few days kicking in together. He had no dreams; no nightmares. He considered that a fair trade.

~'/|\'~

The next morning, he left the house early. Following the instructions on his Personal CPU, connected to the arcology's PAN, he made his way to the academy. He was somewhat surprised that it was outside Sub-London, just as he had been that Misato lived in London-2. He was beginning to get the feeling that not many people lived below the arcology, that it was much more a research facility, experimental type of geocity, and a work place than it was an actual, functional city.

The collar of his new shirt, of the school uniform, was stiff. He slid his fingers under the neck, trying to release the noose-like tightness of it. It really wasn't designed to be worn with the ballistic vest under it, Shinji thought. He needed to go get the next size up from the 'fabber at home. After all, he was sure that they would appreciate it if he suffocated on his own shirt. And it was Monday, and he was feeling still physically a bit tired, like he had been doing some form of great exertion yesterday. Which, he supposed he had. But, as more of a permanent issue, Monday was a loathsome day, only serving to ruin the weekend.

Shinji knew that the thought was illogical. He didn't care. Mondays were a bad day because they connected to the weekend, but were not of it.

The maglev pulled in to the designated station. The school was meant to be nearby, close to one of the botanical areas. Municipal planing interspersed the internal structure of arcologies with frequent areas of "nature", carefully pruned and designed for psychological effects. The enclaves in Outer London were largely inhabited, in fact, by the people who either had problems living in arcologies, so-called "Sick Building Syndrome", or were too poor to afford the more expensive accommodation in the superstructures.

Shinji did not expect to see what he did.

The school, from what he could see, was a fairly standard arcology structure; a selection of cubes, built close together, maximising the volume for their surface area, reaching almost up to the dome separating this layer from the one above. It was a little older than some of the other structures, built in the glass-and-stone aesthetic of the early 2080s', if he was any judge, but kept clean. However, it was surrounded by rather impressive defences. A two-storey wall, reinforced and resembling a castle wall, surrounded it, with some integral hatches that, he guessed, concealed heavier defences.

And there were two suits of power armour at the entrance. And a DNA-scan point.

Shinji was sure that this couldn't all be for him. That would be just... excessive.

Oh wait, he reminded himself, they said that Pilot Ayanami also went here. That would mean that it was only half because of him, which still left it excessive. Mind you, Ashcroft Academies were considered by many to be the pinnacle of education. There were only meant to be two ways to get in; either being very bright indeed, or having a parent working for them (which often meant that genetically, you were likely to be the former.) That made more sense, actually. Ashcroft Europe had headquarters here, and so there were some very high ranking people here indeed, at least as high as in Tokyo, and almost as high as Chicago. That would make their children targets for terrorism and cult activities.

Actually, come to think of it, he was the only child of the Representative of Ashcroft Europe. If his father wasn't an arrogant bastard who had abandoned him to the hands of strangers, he'd be a target for kidnappings. If Gendo wasn't dead inside... well, cultists who hadn't done their research migth still target him, or any of his to-be-classmates.

Yes, that made sense. And was perfectly normal. It would just be silly and overblown to set up all this to protect two pilots.

Guiltily, he glanced down at his hands.

Fine.

Shinji Ikari drew a deep breath, and stepped towards the entry gate.

~'/|\'~

From the other side of the road, in a room supposedly for residential purposes, a pair of FSB operatives watched the entrance; one with his mundane eyes, the other through a video feed mounted on the front of the house. They both hated stake-out duty, but it was necessary.

"We've got an entrance at main gate," called the one on the computer, a Nazzadi woman with dyed white hair. "DNA profile shows it's Acedia. NBV confirms appearance."

The other one, another Nazzadi, this time male, nodded.

"Yes, BV matches appearance of Acedia." He lowered his binoculars. "Right, both Acedia and Invidia have arrived. We can ping MS1."

"Man, she really creeps me out. I mean, I'm fine with normal _amlati_..."

"I should damn well hope so," muttered the man.

"... but _sidoci_ just creep me out. And she obviously hasn't been raised as a proper 'mix should be; she really acts more like a... well not like a house-ape, but closer to that than..."

"Listen," snapped the man. "Just shut up, okay. You don't know what you're talking about. Go on and radio MS1, and then just shut up."

The woman glared at him.

"Okay, okay. Keep your shirt on, Mala. I'm doing it."

A brief report was input into the computer on the table, and sent. The data was converted to binary, split up, insinuated into a network of deliberately virus-infected computers, which triggered a burst of spam to an anonymous email account. This was then copied, and the data extracted, whereupon it was noted by the duty officer, and filed in the records which related to the Evangelion Project, with a cross-link to the files on the Ashcroft Foundation.

~'/|\'~

Shinji was directed by the receptionist to a classroom on level four. The door was open, and from the noise coming from within, there either wasn't a teacher, or the teacher was very liberal on discipline, which, from what he had heard of Academies wasn't that likely.

He stepped, somewhat nervously through the door. The room within was big enough for maybe thirty, but he could only see fifteen or so individuals within, all,he guessed, of his age.

So at least this is probably the right room, he though.

The teenagers were somewhat typical of the new demographic emerging. About half were pure human, he guessed, although... there actually seemed to be more xenomixes than pure Nazzadi. An oddity; they only made up about ten percent of the population as a whole. Oh yes. And Rei, sitting by the window, bandaged up, still with the protective thing over her eye. At least, Shinji though to himself, she seemed a lot better than the last time he had seen her. The skin actually looked like normal human skin, for one, rather than the slightly wrong appearance that recent grafts had.

As he looked over in her direction, a xenomixed girl, an _amlati_, to use the Nazzadi word for the normal offspring of a human and their altered cousins, stepped over, after noticing him hovering around the doorway. Her jet black hair was bound up in pigtails, and he noted that she was wearing the human version of the girls uniform, rather than the Nazzadi one (which would be called "sluttier", with its shorter skirt and optional bared midriff, were it not for the fact that you were not meant to think like that), which probably meant that she had been raised in human cultures, rather than the rather... experimental Nazzadi one. She certainly had a serious look; she was probably the classroom monitor, or something.

He put on his best smile. Hopefully it wasn't too close to a deathly rictus.

"Hello. I'm Hikary, the classroom representative for L6-5. May I help you?"

A Nazzadi name, though, he noted, with a hint of surprise. And I was right about the position of authority.

"My name is Shinji Ikari," he said, politely, trying not to stutter. "I... uh... I was told to go here. That I was part of this class. Um... is that right?"

"Ikari, Ikari..." said Hikary, thoughtfully, tapping her silvery-grey fingers on the door. "Yes, I think I saw the name in the register. I'm sorry, a lot of people didn't turn up for the start of term last week, after the attack on London. Let's see..." she added, walking over to the teacher's desk, and gesturing for him to follow her. "G... G... H...H... I... ah, yes. Shinji Ikari. It noted that you transferred here right at the start of term."

"Yes, well, you know. My father was moved here from Japan."

About eight years ago, he added to himself, but she didn't need to know that.

The look she gave him was unusually penetrating.

"Another Japanese person. Well, well."

"Is there something odd about that?" Shinji asked her, somewhat perplexed.

"Oh, no, not directly. It's just that the Foundation... I'm assuming that you're an AF Child, too. I am, too. Well, it's just that there seems to be disproportionately many Japanese people at the Foundation, in London-2. I mean, both the head scientist and the Director of Operations are. It's said that it's some kind of favouritism by the Rep...re..sent..."

Her voice trailed away.

"Wait, "Ikari". As a surname? The name is written the right way around here, and you're not called Ikari Shinji really? In that case, are you..."

Shinji winced. "Could you keep it down?" he muttered. "He is my father, if that's what you're thinking of, but we don't get on, and I wasn't raised by him."

Hikary nodded, in an understanding manner. "Okay," she replied back, softly.

She raised her voice again.

"You should sit here, until the teacher comes to assign you a position. Do you know how the system works at Academies? Have you decided on your options."

"Well, I honestly wasn't planning to come here. I'd chosen my options for..."

"But you were going to be sitting ACIETs, weren't you." She pronounced the acronym, short for Advanced Comprehensive Individual Educational Tests, as the word 'assets'.

Shinji nodded silently, somewhat intimidated by her bossy efficiency. She was exactly the sort of person who would become an Ashcroft Advisor, those mysterious individuals who, thanks to the massive debts incurred by the NEG to the owners of the patents on almost all arcanotechnology, wielded massive influence over the affairs of the government.

"Then the options will transfer. Here, we do the broad education that everyone does in the mornings, with this class; that's the languages, the history and the basic humanities. Your options will take place in smaller classes in the afternoon."

"Um...okay. That's actually the same as where I was going would have done it."

She smiled. "Then that's fine." Hikary turned away from him, and stared at the rest of the class.

"Ahem."

The word was spoken, rather than just a simple cough. Surprisingly, such a simple pair of syllables did quieten down the sixteen year-olds.

Shinji was frankly shocked by this. Either she had some form of mind control (and she wasn't wearing the identifiers than an individual with Invasive parapsychic powers would have to), the other students respected her authority as class representative (and, frankly, that wasn't likely), or she had a truly fearsome reputation, somehow obtained in the week or so since school had started.

Shinji decided that it would be a very, very good idea to get on her side, as a friend.

"Thank you very much," he said to her, politely.

"No problem," was her reply.

Shinji took a seat near the middle of the classroom, and left his bag there. He then began watching the rest of the class, seeing what names he could pick up from their conversations. He hated that bit of meeting people, the bit where you're forced to learn a large number of new names, and the phrase "Sorry, what was your name," is used far too much; at least twice per person.

Such solace could not be held, as Hikary seemed to be intent on introducing the entire class to him. She really seemed to like organising things. Shinji survived through the questions about why he had joined the school with vague answers about his father, and the usual questions about likes and dislikes with the truth.

Then;

"That's a Sentrytech Mk-V, isn't it."

Shinji looked up. A brown haired, bespectacled boy, ethnically Caucasian, was staring at him, holding a PCPU in his other hand.

Shinji raised an eyebrow unconsciously.

"I'm sorry, I don't think I know your name yet."

"Ken. Ken Aide. But the ballistic vest with trauma-plate additions. It's a Sentrytech Mk-V. Retail price 495 Tn."

"Er, probably. I don't really know. I just was given it."

"Okay." There was a pause. "Did you see anything of what happened with the thing that attacked the city?" There was far, far too much enthusiasm in that sentence. "It was a massive biped according to reports, which means that it can't have been a Migou unit. They're not bipeds... well, apart from Assimilated, but they're brainwashed human beings, so it doesn't count, and Loyalist Nazzadi. Apparently the army used a new type of Engel against it, bigger than even the Seraphs and Chashmals. It's so awesome!"

Shinji groaned, inwardly, a little bit. Ken obviously held the life ambition of becoming a mecha pilot, but would settle for arcanotechnican, as long as he got to open up high technology and have a poke around. He zoned out a bit.

"And anyway, what additional units are you taking? I'm doing Maths, Extended Maths, Conventional Physics (so I can take Arcane Engineering at university) and Chemistry. It looks to be good; the SCIETs were a bit simplified."

"Conventional Physics, Maths, History and, Chemistry, I think." Shinji wasn't quite sure why he chose those options. Obviously, his foster mothers wouldn't have let him take any soft subjects, and he had done best at those four things at the SCIETs, but seeing how Ken had planned out his entire life in front of him, it made him feel...

... well, like a more well balanced person, actually.

~'/|\'~


	4. Interlude 1: Exposition of a Dream

**Interlude 1**

**Exposition of a Dream**

~'/|\'~

Five figures sat around a table.

Red. White. Green. Blue. Yellow

Physically, genetically, they were human. Mentally, they were less so. None of them could have passed a psychoanalysis test without preparation, and access to memories that the eldest among them had not used in almost seventy years. They could portray humanity, true, act like they still thought like the populace for short periods; act like the people who scurried around on the ground, unaware of the beauty of the higher dimensions that they had all seen up close.

Act like the people that they would save, from the Migou, the cults and the ignominy of extinction. The people that they had given their lives and their minds for.

White spoke.

"It is good to see you all here."

Green spoke.

"Likewise. Let us proceed, without meaningless pleasantries."

White spoke.

"I am sorry. I see so few other people directly. Yes, let us proceed."

Blue spoke.

"The third of the beings that we have designated the Heralds has emerged. The lure of the priest was enough, it seems."

Green spoke.

"It was to be expected. They are foolish beings. Were they always so, or did the power that they received from the Endless Ones rot their brains?"

Red spoke.

"And, yet such powers. All our intellect will not save us from their dumb wrath if our Evangelions cannot kill them, and thus empty shoes."

Yellow spoke.

"Yes, they are ours. We can control them."

Red spoke.

"Are they truly ours, though?"

White spoke.

"Speak your mind. I know what you will say."

Red spoke.

"I do not trust Ikari. I fear he has been compromised, either by the Society, or the Avatar of the Endless _resident on Earth right now_."

There was a note of worry in her voice.

Yellow spoke.

"It has always been a problem. The Society would not compromise with the Crawling Chaos, for they oppose each other innately, but we know that Ikari has had links with people that had links with the Society."

Green spoke.

"The Society has many contacts in academia, which is where he was before we recruited him. Statistically, it would be more improbable if he lacked a third degree connection to them than the fact that he does. In that case, I would suspect subversion by Chrysalis, as a deep cover agent by them serving the goals of the Lord of Masques."

Blue spoke.

"Or he may be in it for himself. Or he may be truly loyal to us and our goal. There are so many possibilities. We cannot consider them all."

White spoke.

"Yet."

Blue spoke.

"The passage of D-4 granted by the Endless will not suffice. We cannot consider them yet, so we must anticipate. When we can see them all, we will not need to plan. We will merely need to act, and it will be so. Humanity will be safe."

Red spoke.

"Nevertheless, it is the Society I fear more. I remember her."

Yellow spoke.

"She is dead. That is why you are here. And bitterness against anyone who died a human does not suit us. We are the loathesome ones, the bloody-winged angels that show the truth and are hated for it. And we accept that role fully, as anyone who condoned what we seek to do while limited by the mindset of an uplifted ape would rightly be declared mad."

Blue spoke.

"We are not mad. We are sane. The philosopher said that sanity is for the weak, but he was wrong. Madness is for the weak, those who cannot fight through its embrace, and bend. Sanity is for the truly strong."

White spoke.

"We have recovered a shard of the First. Now, only his kin stand between us and the role that he was slain for by one of his own. The Second is contained."

Green spoke.

"We have an updated list of that which stands in our way before the Human Iteracy Project can be completed."

Red spoke.

"Display it on the hololith."

A list appeared before the five. Few alive could have read it, for it switched between Aklo, Pnakotic, R'lyehan and Tsath-yo at random.

**1****st ****CODENAME: **El

**LOCATION: **CENSORED, DECEASED

**IDENTITY: **KNOWN, CENSORED

**2****nd ****CODENAME: **Baal-Haddad

**LOCATION: **CENSORED

**IDENTITY: **KNOWN, CENSORED

**3****rd ****CODENAME:** Asherah

**LOCATION:** DECEASED

**IDENTITY:** KNOWN, CENSORED

**4****th ****CODENAME:** Kathirat

**LOCATION:** UNKNOWN

**IDENTITY:** SUSPECTED - 4th ORDER PROBABILITY

**5****th ****CODENAME:** Mot

**LOCATION:** UNKNOWN

**IDENTITY:** UNKNOWN

**6****th ****CODENAME: **Yam

**LOCATION: **SUPECTED - 3rd ORDER PROBABILITY

**IDENTITY: **UNKNOWN

**7****th ****CODENAME:** Shalim-Shachar

**LOCATION:** UNKNOWN

**IDENTITY/S :** SUSPECTED - 1st ORDER PROBABILITY

**8****th ****CODENAME: **Moloch

**LOCATION: **KNOWN

**IDENTITY:** KNOWN - 2nd ORDER PROBABILITY

**9****th ****CODENAME:** Melqart

**LOCATION:** UNKNOWN

**IDENTITY:** UNKNOWN

**10****th ****CODENAME: **Yarikh

**LOCATION:** UNKNOWN

**IDENTITY: **UNKNOWN

**11****th ****CODENAME: **Resheph

**LOCATION: **UNKNOWN

**IDENTITY: **UNKNOWN

**12****th ****CODENAME:** Choron

**LOCATION: **UNKNOWN

**IDENTITY: **UNKNOWN

**13****th ****CODENAME:** Kothar

**LOCATION: **UNKNOWN

**IDENTITY:** KNOWN

**14****th ****CODENAME:** Shapash

**LOCATION:** UNKNOWN

**IDENTITY:** UNKNOWN

**15****th ****CODENAME:** Shamayim

**LOCATION: **UNKNOWN

**IDENTITY:** UNKNOWN

**16****th ****CODENAME:** Qadeshtu

**LOCATION: **UNKNOWN

**IDENTITY:** UNKNOWN

**17****th ****CODENAME**: CENSORED

**LOCATION:** CENSORED

**IDENTITY:** KNOWN, CENSORED

White smiled, the corners of her wrinkled mouth barely turning up at the corners.

White spoke.

"How goes the Dummy Plug system?"

Red spoke.

"Not all well as might be hoped. Even with all the aid I can provide in my current state, we are limited by the status of _Xue'Vehulu'Ia'Ia_."

Most would have shuddered at those horrible words, not designed for a human throat. Yet even that name was but a codename for another project, not a blasphemous entity in itself.

Blue spoke.

"Ikari's project, with the prototype, and access to the Second, goes better."

Red spoke.

"It is the difference between a Type 1 EFCS and a Type 2. I am only familiar with the Type 2."

Green spoke.

"True. The meeting is conluded."

White nodded.

"Yes."

~'/|\'~


	5. Chapter 4: Of the Flight of Birds

**Chapter 4**

Of the Flight of Birds

~'/|\'~

Time passed, as it had a habit of doing.

Shinji settled into his class, although the constant training reaped a toll upon his homework. Three nights a week were spent down in the London Geocity, in the simulation body, and, as he got used to the control, in Unit 01 itself. This was saved purely for the AT-field practice; the cost of activating the Evangelion in repairs to both the machine and the surrounding environment, Dr Akagi had snappishly informed him, was rather high.

Two weeks later, he was sitting in the main classroom, with his .daf5 player on, when a Nazzadi student he didn't recall entered; very tall and lanky, with a sports jacket on, over his uniform. However, from the reaction of Hikary, she seemed to know him, so he put it out of his mind, and let the music of long dead composers drown out the rest of the class. His main desire was for sleep; he had been in a simulation body from six in the afternoon to ten at night, and then had been up until half midnight finishing his homework.

Apparently Misato found it preferable that he fell asleep at school, than he handing in homework late. She didn't really get it, did she?

Groggily, he glanced over at the other Child, sitting by the window on the side of the room which was, most definitely, _hers_. She was staring out the window, the pseudo-sunlight of the arcology casting her porcelain (and it wasn't just that in colour, he thought, shudderingly, but in some indefinable way in texture too, too smooth and perfect) skin in a yellow light. She was still in bandages, and yet he hadn't ever seen her miss a homework. It was vaguely creepy, like a perfect, clockwork mechanism.

Shinji shrugged, and looked away. It was almost certainly nothing important.

~'/|\'~

"... and we now come to the Second War. This is defined by most _reputable_," and here the teacher put a heavy emphasis on that word, "authorities on modern history to have begun with the arrival of the Migou Hive ship in an Earth orbit, on the 12th of January, 2074. There are some who argue that the explosion in Tibet in late December was the true start of the war, in the "First Strike" hypothesis, but study of the radioisotopes found there, before the conquest of that area by the Rapine Storm in mid-2077, clearly confirm that the explosion was that of multiple nuclear-fission devices. These matched warheads that had been missing, ever since the foundation of the NEG in 2059. More specifically, when the Migou,who at that point were using the Nazzadi as pawns..."

There was a faint muttering from the Nazzadi and Nazzadi-raised _amlati_ members of the class. This was still a very sensitive subject; Nazzadi loyalists still appeared in Migou forces, to a level that they were breeding more, or that there were a lot more defections than anyone was willing to admit. The Legion was still active too, and sanctioned by the New Earth Government to carry out inquisitorial purges on their own people, to remove anyone accused, with some (but not enough, according to critics) evidence.

"... attacked by proxy, the predecessor to the New Earth Government, the New United Nations, attempted to unify Earth against the invaders. This ended the Second Cold War, bringing China and the Middle East into the New Earth Government, but hardliners in the Chinese Government opposed this, including an attempted coup which noticeably compromised defences around the east of China, resulting in that region's rapid fall to the Nazzadi military."

The teacher took a sip of water from a glass on his table.

"Naturally, the hardliners, deprived of military support and facing a foe armed with Migou designed war machines..."

The hands of about half the non-_homo sapiens sapiens_ member of the class shot up.

The teacher sighed.

"Now, I'm sure that you're all going to raise the same point, so I'm just going to pick one of you, and you can make the objection. Taly?"

The girl, her hair dyed white, rose to her feet.

"While it is true that the Migou did create the warfleet from... the First Arcanotech War, the design was done by the Firstborn Nazzadi themselves. The Migou stayed out of it. I mean, it's not as if their bodies are compatible with the Operator Extension Side Effect."

"But the Firstborn had been created by the Nazzadi with full knowledge of what they were, as opposed to the vat-grown. Even if they did the design work, which is debated..."

"It is not!" snapped back Taly, angrily. She stopped, blushing, as she realised that she had gone too far with that response.

A good percentage of the adolescent male population of the room sighed internally, and a few externally, at that blush. The general consensus was that she was very attractive indeed.

"It quite obviously is, Ms. Taly, or else it would not be the viewpoint held by the academic community. If I may finish what I was saying before you interrupted... it wouldn't be too much, would it? Yes, as I was saying, the Firstborn were raised by the Migou, as the individuals who would create a false culture to rule over when the Nazzadi had wiped out humanity (which is to be more specific, _homo sapiens sapiens_). All their work would be a result of their exposure to Migou culture, not the false mythology that they themselves constructed. I don't believe that I would be wrong in saying that, even if there were no direct Migou involvement in the design of the mecha, they are the ones that designed them, none the less."

The teacher stared at the class. The gaze implied extra homework and detentions for those individuals who did not quiet down. The threats seemed to work wonders on the more agitated students.

"To break off from this detour, the hardliners were defeated, but it was never determined whether or not they had been completely exterminated. The epicentre of the so-called First Strike was an Ashcroft Foundation facility, and the Chinese hardliners had always been militantly opposed to the Foundation, and the _de facto_ military supremacy it gave to the New United Nations, with the provision of arcanotech. Now, it is possible that the attack may have been provoked by the Migou, as they have been known, historically, to operate in that area; indeed, their name comes from the Nepalese "Mi-Go", their name for the mythology of a creature called in English "The Abominable Snowman.""

The teacher paused.

"Of course, now we know that the Abominable Snowman is a completely different phenomenon to the Migou, as seen by the use of white-furred beasts, resemblant of humanity in only the most distant, atavistic way, by the Rapine Storm in the Fall of China." He took another sip of water. "But, again we must return to that dreaded state known as being "on topic".

Shinji was listing rather intently to this. The Modern History teacher had a pronounced tendency to go off on tangents about things barely related to the overall course, but which still tended to be quite interesting. And, of course, the inevitable arguments that arose over any piece of history which concerned the Nazzadi, before the Firstborn Marshal Vreta, had rebelled after the realisation that the people he was exterminating were far more alike to him than his masters back on Yuggoth, and had taken three quarters of the fleet with him.

Some hadn't really forgiven the Nazzadi for what they'd done before that. There had been over eight billion people alive before the First Arcanotech War. Less than four billion humans saw the end of it. From the way he acted, the way that he was a little colder around Nazzadi members of the class, Shinji guessed that the teacher was one of them. He was the right age to have fought in that war, with the first wide-scale deployment of arcanotech in warfare. The older generations were far less open-minded about Nazzadi and xenomixes, than the younger ones.

He glanced over at Rei. She was surrounded by a circle of empty desks two thick. Of course, there were limits. Normal _amlati_ were fine, but Whites, _sidoci_, just creeped everybody out. For one, scientists didn't know why they looked like that. _Amlati_ were what you expected someone who had both melanin and... whatever the pigment Nazzadi used, Shinji couldn't quite remember the name, in their skin. Plus, they were all, without question, parapsychics. Shinji wondered what Rei could do. She wasn't wearing the emblems that all Invasive or Dangerous ones had to wear, like some of the ones he had seen around the school. Did it make her a better pilot? He remembered his father's words about parapsychics. No, he wasn't one.

Ken, however, was paying very little attention to the lesson. Why bother? He already knew all the military history that they taught in schools, and quite a bit from higher levels. It wasn't as if they were going over any interesting bits yet, like the battles (the Fall of New Kuala Lumpur, the Assault on Florida, the Defence of Paris). So, as a result, he had his PCPU out on the table, concealed by his datasheets.

_Oh, no,_ he wrote, _the older versions of the game, classic ones dating back about 100 years, were rather different. For one, everything in the fluff was a lot darker. The bugs were nerfed, you know, as from a galactic level power to a more minor threat; after all, who wants to play the Migou? The cults were kept, but it was set so that no-one could say that they were the good guys, 'cause of how __different modern society is. Of course, they did the opposite to the I..._

Ken's train of thought trailed off. He quite carefully made sure that he deleted the last sentence. The moderators were rather harsh, and it was an IP bannable offense to criticise the NEG even by implication, with a possible reference to the FSB, too. Sure, the anti-sedition laws weren't that harsh yet, but the fans of a game that some would already consider treading on thin ice were extra sure to keep themselves beyond reproach.

The screen flashed white, then grey.

_Bugger_, he thought. _It's crashed. Stupid PCPU._

Then an image loaded onto the screen, followed by text.

The headline read:

**TOP SECRET ENGEL SAVES LONDON-2**

There was a picture of a mecha, doing what looked like a military exercise, to his eyes, in the middle of a forest. But if that was a forest, then the Engel was massive. The normal Seraph was just over seventeen metres tall, the pride of the NEGA. From the scaling provided by the side of the image, that thing looked to be over forty metres at the shoulders alone.

Ken began hyperventilating into his hand.

And the sky above it didn't look really real. It looked a lot like... the London Geocity! From the school trip, back in fourth year.

_This means_, he thought to himself, _that the stories about the NEGA unit that killed the thing that almost got to the arcology were true. It's here. It's very, very nearby._

He scanned through the rest of the text, as fast as possible. There were more pictures. They were so unbelievably cool. The blue-grey behemoth blew up inflatable targets, what looked to be some old Jayne-class artillery units, sprinted through a forest.

Then he got to the last image, and promptly fell off his chair.

The teacher paused his lecture on the early events of the Second Arcanotech War (with occasional detours into other subjects), and raised one eyebrow at the fallen teenager.

"And what exactly do you think you're doing, Kenneth?" the question came, dripping condensation.

Ken picked himself up.

"I... I... I f-fell off m-m-my chair," he said, wheezing heavily.

_Ohmygodohmygodohmygod_ his interior voice ran. He knew, vaguely, that it made him sound like a thirteen-year old girl. He didn't care.

"Are you hurt? You look like you winded yourself."

"I... I think I did," he replied. "Wind myself, that is...I'll be fine; just need to c-catch my breath."

"Well, if we can get through without any more failed attempts at flight..." and then he paused, for the due sycophantic chuckle from the rest of the class, which merely highlighted the pre-existing sniggering at the fall, "we can continue with the New Earth Government's policy of withdrawal from areas where the superior strategic manoeuvrability of the Nazzadi forces counted most, forcing them into areas where their inferior armour suffered most at the hands of the Army's firepower, which was still, at that time, based around the tank squadron. You see, the mecha is inferior to the tank in the type of battle that was prevalent before the Arcanotech Wars, in the internal Earth conflicts before Unification. Only the systematic violation (and, yes, I am aware of the synonym for that word that I am sure that some of you are applying) of the laws of physics, as commonly understood at the turn of the last century, makes them a viable alternative. I have personally seen an old Mal-class Main Battle Tank gut a Storm main battle mecha..."

But Ken wasn't listening. And the PCPUs of most of the school had received an identical message, spread by a virus which had subverted the internal school network. When the student population switched them back on at break, they too would get the same file, and a corrupted version would be sent to the main PAN of the arcology, spreading further, and alerting the population to the existence of the Evangelion Project.

Something that a lot of very powerful people did not want. At all.

And a few did.

~'/|\'~

A collection of figures met in a darkened room; three humans, one _amlati_, one Nazzadi. The general effect would have been somewhat more intimidating and melodramatic had they been wearing robes embroidered with occult symbols, the air filled with scented incense devoted to the blind god that was reality, and the walls had been daubed in blood spelling out blasphemous curses against the very fabric of reality. The fact that they were all clad in the functional, slightly dirty clothing of sanitation workers, and the room, which stank of cleaning fluid was crammed with mops and the other tools of the janitor, really ruined the dramatic suspense.

That was because they were professionals.

Well, technically not professionals. For them to be professionals, they would have to be paid for the killings, torture and acts of terrorism that they committed in the service of their organisation. Only one of the people in the room was fully human any more; the others would be shot on sight by the New Earth Government if it had an inkling of what they were, who they worked for, and what they intended. It had no clue. Their organisation had its tendrils deep, buried into the occult underground, the New Earth Government, higher education, the Ashcroft Foundation, and even the Evangelion Project. What it lacked in breadth of influence, it more than made up for in depth.

"This area is clean and safe. There is no monitoring equipment here." The eldest-looking of them, a Nazzadi woman with prominent strands of white in her jet hair, and pronounced crows-feet around her eyes spoke first, in a manner that clearly would have stated to a hypothetical observer that _she_ was the one who was in charge, and that she would permit no discussion about that fact.

The individual who called herself Jalimony had not been born on Earth, but was in fact a child of the original Nazzadi invasion fleet, grown in a vat by the Migou in 2058 as a three year old, to back up the implanted memory of her genetic parents.

_Yeah_, she idly thought. _Macbeth would be screwed nowadays, what with any Nazzadi over the age of forty._

She had been made as one of a set of tools to ensure Nazzadi loyalty, to make them believe they had a history other than the ones which the Yuggothian fungi had given her people. That loyalty had been broken in 2064, when she was biologically nine. And now she served to enforce loyalty in other ways. She was the handler for a group of monsters. And she was good at her job. She enjoyed it, in the way of the true believer. She looked at her charges.

_A nihilist metalhead, an over-curious occultist who we recruited before any of our rivals could, an innocent looking _amlati _with borderline schizophrenia, and a fanatic who uses her belief to quiet any conscience she may have possessed before we found her,_ her internal monologue ran. _These are the tools I have to use to save mankind._

I'm so proud of them! They're close to perfect! They're a group of devoted killers who nevertheless retain enough of their humanity to appear sane.

She didn't let that internal smile show on her face. She had to maintain her appearance in front of them, after all, even if she was sure that at least three of them viewed her as the murder's mother. And she had to think about them in the names that they'd taken after the change, forget that she knew their real names, to prevent her from telling things if she was captured by the NEG or... others.

"Obviously I've seen the effects of your last task. The D-Generator was crippled right on time, which allowed our other agents to perform the tasks that they had to at the See HQ and in Armourcorp. I must ask a few questions about your choice of methods, though." She turned to stare at the _amlati_, a girl who looked barely old enough to be out of school, probably still 18 or 19, with long hair that, in this disguise, was twisted up into a bundle at the back of her head.

"Mantodea. I would question how you disposed of the bodies of the men that See had left to guard the secondary generator."

"What makes you think that I killed them?" the girl replied, in a slightly dreamy voice, with definite undertones of confusion.

"I do have the police reports, you know. Only you would generate that much blood."

"I accidentally tore out the throats of one of them. I meant to barb them both, but one got around a corner, and, well," she raised up her petite hands, "these things aren't meant for subtlety."

"Mantodea." The handler's voice was gentler than when she spoke to the others. "What did you do with the bodies?"

"Oh, that?" She chuckled. "I handled them down to manageable chunks, then flew up and stuffed them into the coolant vents in the See facility." A faint reddish blush emerged on her grey cheeks. "I just thought it would be nice for the See men to get a surprise after we were gone. I mean, they didn't even give us any Dees to make us play with, which was nice, so I thought they could get something pink and sticky." The smile was too wide. "People like that, don't they. I got some nice sweets on Valentine's Day."

Internally, Jalimony sighed to herself. Something inside Mantodea had broken when they had transformed her into her true role. Most came through relatively intact, but she had emerged as something slightly stronger than her psyche could handle, and thus it has warped and bent, like a piece of wet wood left out too long under a burning sun.

"Yes, good thinking. However, try to minimise the amount of blood you cause." She tried to put herself into the girl's mindset. "They'll now suspect something about your present, while if you'd kept it clean, they might not have found them until later."

The _amlati_ blinked, wide eyed. "Oh, yes. I understand."

"Good, good," she said, her gaze returning to the group as a whole. "I presume the rest went as planned? Strange planted the bombs, while Ocellus monitored the facility, and Deva kept the way out clean?"

The three other members of the cell nodded. The one who called himself Strange was a slight man; his face long and thin, with a strong thin nose, which seemed twisted almost permanently into a wry expression of sardonic humour. This pale visage was framed with shoulder length hair, black and greasy, tied into a crude ponytail that it always seemed to be wanting to escape from. He was their field expert in the occult, with a talent for finding books for the organisation; the very talent that had seen him selected first as a agent. He had been subjected to the Rite to help ensure his loyalty, the group had deemed that he knew too much to risk any defection; had he not been loyal, he would have been devoured. Ocellus beside him was almost a younger, cleaner version of the same, with the same style of hair, although his was a medium brown. His fingers idly twitched, sometimes, as he picked out chords on an imaginary guitar. He was a slight problem for their organisation, a valuable resource somewhat underused. He had been expected to leave the Ashcroft Foundation shortly after his ascension to the role of a sacred warrior, but an unexpected promotion, into a top secret Foundation project (Jalimony didn't dare think its name, even in the privacy of her own head), mean that he was more valuable as a computer technician on the project, able to leak information to her group. They had other agents, she was sure, because she knew things about the project that very few other humans did.

And Deva. A little plump, and slightly maternal looking, she was the most experienced of her murder. This normal, maybe even comforting-looking woman, ethnically from the Asian sub-continent, trained as a doctor from a long line of doctors, had, by Jalimony's estimate, the blood of several hundred on her hands, although not necessarily the hands that she was wearing at that moment.

"Then we have another task." The Nazzadi woman handed over a PCPU to Deva, the leader of the pack. "Contained within are the details on Unama, who uses the surname of Bright. He's..."

"Some figure in See." It was Ocellus. "He's an engineer-scientist type. He's in charge of a group at Armourcorp, who provide advanced composites to the Project, without overt knowledge of what it is."

The handler nodded. "Correct. We need him dead."

"Is he a Dough-Boy?," asked Strange.

"No, we don't believe so. He checked out negative recently, and he's too prominent for them to risk the exposure. However, we suspect his wife is, although we're not sure exactly which type. Thus we want her dead too. That means that he'll be one of the Children."

"Do they have children?" It was Deva. Jalimony nodded. She knew that Deva already knew the answer to the question.

Mandotea nodded, frowning. "They need to die, too. They're unclean, all of them." She paused, screwing up her face. "School run. I can kill them all easily, when they're bunched up."

"Where do they live?" Deva asked. "I suspect this will be difficult. High ranking Sees, especially when they've got Dees in the family, and are still pretending to be normal, like their space, and will have a lot of security." She put her hands on her waist. "You know, Manny really did have a good idea, although it depends on whether they're playing family. Doesn't matter, they're unclean anyway. We'll just kill them all, anyway, even if Strange has to just run in through the house next door and drop a bomb in their bedroom," she added, in a colder tone.

"I'll leave planning for you," Jalimony replied, rapidly. "We've been in here almost long enough that the next shift should be coming in. Take your cleaning stuff with you, we don't want them finding extras. I'll find you, once the family is dead. All of them, plus the Dee bodyguards they'll inevitably have."

The janitor's closet emptied after that, leaving at forty second intervals. A family was going to die, because it was necessary.

And because every individual in the room, only one of whom was still fully human, held them to be inhuman monsters, that deserved to be put down rather than murdered.

~'/|\'~

The student concourse was in uproar. A light, airy room, it was given to the elder two years as a privilege, a place with comfy sofas and a nano-fabricator with some good coffees and teas loaded. It was not being used for its intended purpose. A heaving mass of people, members of L6-5 forming the nucleus, was reaching the approximate density of degenerate matter, and was in severe risk of violating the Pauli Exclusion Principle. Hundreds of hands held a PCPU, and all of them were at the last image on the page that the virus had distributed.

The image that showed Shinji Ikari, in the suit of an Engel pilot, standing on the gantry in front of the powered down Unit 01, talking to Misato, who herself was wearing her Major's uniform.

He was getting crushed in here. Despite the advances in material science, a bullet-proof vest, even with integral stab-proof plates, didn't prevent you from being flattened by a horde of sixteen, seventeen and eighteen year olds. Shinji felt vaguely betrayed by this, especially since the thing was hot and heavy, and felt so more that usual.

And the voices. So many of them, calling at at once in a manner that made it obvious that mankind evolved from apes, with the communal cadence as close to nothing as a troupe of chimpanzees. Not bonobos (sadly now extinct), as everyone still had all their clothes on (excluding the people who wanted him to sign their shirts), but still more befitting _pan_ than _homo_. Certain questions, recurring ones, could be picked out from the refrain, though.

"How were you selected!?"

"Were there any special exams?"

"Is it frightening?"

"What're the controls like?"

"How do you pilot it?"

"Do you have a chip in your brain?"

"What's its name?"

"What do you call it?"

"Is it really an Engel? Not a large normal mecha?"

"Please," Shinji called out. "Just back away. I can't really breath!"

But his voice was drowned out.

There was a sharp whistle, from over near the entrance, at an ear-piercing volume. As one, the mob turned to face the noise, but with that terrible slowness that indicated that they already knew what it was. A deathly silence washed from the outside, in to the core.

It was worse. It was two teachers, flanked by soldiers in full combat carapace. The teachers looked enraged. The soldiers had stun batons out. To the left, but slightly behind the authority figures, stood Hikary, her face locked in a mask of superiority.

Without any words,the emergent behaviour of the mob played out. The individuals on the other side of the crowd from the teachers began to drift off, their attitude quite obviously screaming that they had absolutely nothing to do with any swarming, and they had just been there to see what all the fuss was. Meanwhile, a subtle shift in the position of those who had been closest to the centre of the mob made it look like they had been valiantly defending their classmate, and had, in no conceivable way, been the ones who had trapped him in the middle and been most feverishly asking questions.

It didn't work. The teachers weren't that stupid. The room ended up sealed, while the Headmaster of the Academy was dragged away from his tea (black, sweet) to give the lecture, complete with warnings under the New Earth Government Official Secrets Act, which he had prepared ever since he had taken over the school, and been told of the status of the other pilot, Rei Ayanami. The warnings were both dire and in the uttermost seriousness. Ironically, of course, he suspected that the parents of quite a lot of the students could have explained it better to their progeny than he could have, given how many layers of NDAs and legal barriers to disclosure they were under. After the speech, he went to his office, and made an urgent call to the Ashcroft headquarters, to reveal that there had been a breach in operational security. The message had already been reported in dodecahedrate by the legions of individuals watching the Academy from Ashcroft, the GIA, the FSB, the OIS, the NEGA and he suspected even more groups, before he had finished the speech, but he had to do it properly.

Shinji himself, the boy who, indirectly, had sizeable amounts of the global intelligence community swearing very loudly at the top of their lungs at the security breach, wasn't actually called into the lecture theatre. That was a small mercy, to be permitted an escape from the inevitable pointing and the stares at his unintentional celebrity. He slumped down into one of the abandoned chairs.

Well. How the the hell had that happened? How had they found out that he was the pilot of the Unit 01? Was this some kind of viral marketing stunt, to "raise morale" and distract people from the fact that the New Earth Government had let an extradimensional creature break into the London-2 arcology itself? Quite possibly, actually. Great, so he got to have people staring at him all the time, as well as being forced... well, he admitted to himself, he had signed the contract freely, that is, now being made to spend his time training in the Evangelion.

He felt a presence behind him, as the hairs on his neck rose.

He turned.

"Oh, hey, Hikary. Thanks for..." he began.

"I'm sorry about that happening..." she said simultaneously.

They stared at each other uncomfortably for a moment. Shinji gestured at her to continue with a slight movement of his right hand.

"Yes. Um, I'm sorry about everyone acting like that."

Shinji snorted. "Like you could have controlled them on your own." He shuddered slightly. "It was like they were crazy." There was a pause. "Aren't you worried about, you know, what people think about you. I mean, you got soldiers to come."

"Oh, that wasn't really me," she replied. "They were just standing around a coffee fabber, and as soon as I mentioned your name, to the teachers, that is, they came running." Hikary perched on another one of the seats, sitting on the back of the chair, and smoothed her skirt down. "And I'm already the goody-goody monitor; have been to them since we were eleven. All the ones who might hate me for reporting on them already do."

"Eleven?" Shinji queried.

"Since coming to this Academy. This one only covers secondary education. Most of us have been here from the start." She stared at him, a shrewd look in her eyes. "What do you know about Rei?"

Shinji blinked. The question had come completely out of the blue.

"I... uh... what?"

"Rei Ayanami. The _sidoci_? Bandages?"

Shinji tried obfuscation. "Not much. She doesn't seem to talk to anyone."

"Yes. Not talk to anyone for over five years." Hikary looked at the puzzlement in Shinji's eyes, interpreting it correctly. "Yes. Quite. She's been here as long as any of us, and we don't know anything about her. I mean, she's odd... that is, quiet and introverted even for a _sidoci_, and that's saying something."

Shinji raised an eyebrow. "You know any more Whites?" The strange children, who sometimes, among those who knew their 20th Century literature, bore the name of Midwitch Cuckoos, were rare. Perhaps one in a hundred xenomixed children were born completely colourless, with the prodigious paraphysic powers that often manifested in the cradle.

"I know a few. My dad kept in touch with his people, and quite a lot of the ones like him, the ones made as children, ended up marrying humans. It's why there's a lot of us," and then she held her hands wide, raising attention to her greyish skin, "at the Academy; the scientist types ended up mixing a lot more that the combatants," she said, smiling vaguely, "and one thing led to another, and my sisters and me happened." The smile vanished. "My grandfather is an old-school type, one of those "The Nazzadi Race must remain Pure until we have a Cultural Identity" types," Hikary said bitterly, putting on an affected heavy accent, "so I ended up spending time with my mother's side of the family."

"I'd wondered about the name, in all honesty, when you act so..." he replied.

"Human?" she said, completing the sentence. "Yeah. I happen to think that the whole Nazzadi culture thing is a bit of a scam. I mean, the original was made up by the Migou, and really, they were not that original. I mean, the whole "Proud Warrior Race" thing. Looks more like the fungi were spending too much time abducting fans of bad 20th century fantasy and sci-fi."

"I'm sure that... what's her name? Taly? Tary? I'm not really sure, but she wouldn't like you talking like that," added Shinji, with a faint smirk on his face.

Surprisingly, Hikary frowned. "Okay, don't smirk like that. It makes you look... it just looks weird, okay." Her face returned to normal. "But, yes, admittedly this little rant was partly annoyance at her and her silly points. You haven't seen how bad it can get; I ended up with her for my SCIETs and we barely finished the History course because of how they dragged out the "The First Arcanotech War" module with their silly objections. But, anyway. You should get away from here. When the lecture finishes, they'll all be returning, and they'll be... annoyed, let's just say, for missing quite a bit of lunch."

Shinji stood up. He liked Hikary, he didn't mind admitting. She was attractive, in the special way that xenomixes seemed to be; hybrid vigour _et al_, but that didn't seem to be as important as her personality, to use that eternal cliché. For one, she'd kept the secret about who his father was, or at the very least he hadn't had a mob of people screaming about how he was the son of the Representative. From the resemblance between a legion of fans and a lynch mob, he preferred it that way. Secondly, she actually liked him, or seemed to, at least as far as he could tell. He wasn't a mind-reader, and the female mind was an odd thing.

He sincerely hoped that she wasn't just rescuing him out of some duty to her role. Or that she wasn't a spy working for his father, as a means of control beyond the contract. Shinji wouldn't put it past the bastard to have an elite clan of child ninja to watch over his "elite" Evangelion pilots (putting inverted commas around the word "elite", unless the definition included grabbing someone who hadn't even been in a suit of powered armour before) .

_But, no, that wasn't a good way to think. That way led to paranoia, and not trusting anyone, isolating yourself from humanity for fear of what other people would do._

Shinji was struck by a sudden, inexplicable urge to find out about his paternal grandfather, and whether the man had possessed his own legion of child ninja, of Clan Rokubungi. But, no, that was still a silly thought. Even if it would explain so, so much...

He suddenly remembered that he was still part of a conversation.

"Oh, yes. Seriously, Hikary, thanks. I'm in your debt."

"No, honestly," she replied, the faintest hint of a reddish-black blush on her grey cheeks, "it was fine."

"So, um, yes. Uh, bye."

"Bye."

Shinji felt like whistling as he walked away. Sure, the morning had been unpleasant, and there were probably future unpleasantness from the revelation of his identity. But it was quite hard to see how the day could get any worse.

~'/|\'~

Major Misato Katsurugi of the New Earth Government Army and Director of Operations (Military) for the Ashcroft Foundation and the Evangelion Project was not having a good day, and she couldn't really see how it could get much worse. For one, she was still feeling a little hungover from last night, and the beers she had imbibed after returning home at one in the morning. She had been dragged from her nice, soft, warm bed, first by Ritsuko's mundane questions about the status of the Third Child, and then followed by, at around lunchtime for the rest of the population, insane screaming phone calls from ever single agency that knew about the Evangelion Project, and a few that had just found out about it.

She had managed to get from bed to full military uniform and out of the house in four minutes, thirty two seconds, which was an achievement even for her, considering the effort it required to put on heavy carapace armour. It was a compromise. By wearing her Spectrashield Heavy, it excused the lack of make-up, and also reminded the rest of the room that she was a member of the military, not just an Ashcroft civilian.

She looked around the room to which she would have to be explaining the reason why there appeared to be a leak in a supposedly top secret project. The Federal Bureau of Security agents were on the left, as the police with control of pan-jurisdiction crimes and matters of potential regional importance. They wouldn't be too hard to explain to; they were only involved in a fairly minor role, mainly in the protection of the Children, and they too would have to explain how the virus had got past the protection they had put on the area network of the PAN which covered the sector in which the Academy was located. Likewise, the Global Inteligence Agency only valued the project in the sense that it was a valuable military resource, and thus the intense secrecy that the project had enjoyed beforehand was, in a sense, opposed to their goals. They were the NEG's spies, counter-spies, propagandists and information analysts and so, if the project went public, it could see considerably more deployment, and heaven knew that the Fronts were heavily pressed. She had received complaints of the under-use of the Evangelions, even when the project had been on ice, with only the Prototypes and one Mass Production Model. It had been planned that it would happen at some point, so the contingencies would kick in. The New Earth Government Army would side with the GIA, if she was any guess, although they would push for heavier involvement from the NEGA side, probably for a "pure" military officer to have direct control over deployment and tactics, rather than split loyalties she had.

Both the GIA and the NEGA had something to gain from the Project going public. Thus, they were suspects in the leak. After all, nothing important had been given away. By linking the project to the Engels, it gave a false view of their capabilities, and no technical specifications had made their way into the information, not even a formal height. It was almost as if it had been designed this way, which almost certainly meant that it had been.

The Office of Internal Security would not be so forgiving. Name a law that the FSB had to follow, and it was almost certain that the OIS were exempted from it. Due process, _habeas corpus_, human rights; the OIS had no need to follow those guidelines in their tasks; the regulation of all forms of extra-dimensional activity, whether technological, sorcerous or parapsychic. They took a great deal of interest in both the Engel Project and the Evangelion Project; it was rumoured that they were the ones who had applied the pressure which had seen the latter put on ice, and the former developed in such secrecy. They believed that the public should not know about such things, that they should only see sorcery in strictly controlled situations, and they ran the registration scheme for the parapsychic community, enforcing the markings that all individuals classified as Dangerous or Invasive had to wear, all the time. They would not be happy at a new project entering the public domain which did much the same as the Engel Project, especially the oddities of the pilots, and the use of ... well, child soldiers, if Misato were to be honest with herself. If there was one blessing, it was that when the Evangelions weren't doing... the tentacle thing, she recalled, shuddering, they were about at mundane looking as a Malach or a Seraph. If they looked like a Tarshish or a Hamshal, it would have been a lot worse. They'd propose damage control, she knew, a tailored virus released into the global information network which purged any copies of the leaked data, any scan of it, and certainly any attempt to upload it to anywhere.

Misato cleared her throat, and shuffled her data-slates. She really wished that she had had time to put on make-up. Her face felt naked in front of all of these gazes, some of which were wanting for her to slip up, so they could supplant her role.

"Ladies, gentlemen. I regret to inform you that, at 12:38 GMT today, images of Unit 01 of the Evangelion Project, and of the individual code-named Acedia and designated by the internal standards of the Project as the Third Child, found their way into a virus which overrode all Personal Computer Processing Units it infected and displayed these images, which appear to have come from the internal and external cameras in the London Geocity. Accompanying these images was an overview of the nature of the Project, although only at the lowest security levels," and here she rolled her eyes, "which is an entirely relative term when it comes to the Evangelion Project."

The entire audience already knew this.

"The source of the virus appears to have originated from within the grounds of the Ashcroft Academy codenamed "Malebolgia", which the individuals codenamed "Invidia" and "Acedia" attend. Fortunately, the "grey-box" type firewall installed around Malebolgia by the FSB," Misato nodded to their contingent, "although not completely stopping it due to the adaptive nature of the virus, at least corrupted it. The phage sub-system ensured that the data was corrupted. Of the virus that escaped to the main PAN, only the first half of the document remained even partially intact."

That part of the statement should mollify the OIS at least somewhat, she thought.

"That means that, yes, the identity of the Third Child, Acedia, remains a secret to all outside the Academy grounds, in the realworld area of its partially isolated network. This makes this a data issue, not a direct threat to the pilots themselves."

She noted the slight loosening of the faces of much of her audience,as the level of the threat was downgraded.

"I can assure you that both of the Children are perfectly safe."

~'/|\'~

The incoming first collided with Shinji's nose, with the impactor coming out considerably for the better. He fell back in surprise and pain, the hot sensation from within his nose telling him that he was probably having a nosebleed.

The tall, lanky Nazzadi boy massaged his fist, and stared at the prone Child.

"Sorry, transferee, but I had to do that. I couldn't really be satisfied with a _harang_ like you getting to walk around unless I got one hit in."

Shinji stared up at the black-skinned boy, with the skin like anthracite and red eyes glinting, like the eyes of cats, in the false sunlight. Now he really got why the Migou had made _homo sapiens nazzadi_ like they did. The teenager standing over him stood with one foot in the Uncanny Valley.

"You... you just hit me," Shinji said, his voice muffled by the fingers that he had clamped around his nose. "What the... why... what the fuck?!"

The Nazzadi didn't answer, instead letting Ken, the military geek from their class answer for him. Shinji guessed that he must have been the one that came in in the morning, because he didn't remember seeing this one before. Ken leaned in a conspiratorial manner, his AR-enhanced glasses gleaming in the light. Modern medical technology had made optical correcting lenses redundant; the only people who wore glasses were people who couldn't bear to be away from Augmented Reality, or the types who wore them as a fashion statement.

"Sorry, really, but his younger sister got hurt in the battle. That's why he did it."

_People who might view the late deployment of the Evangelion as the failure of the NEG to save their loved ones_ had been one of the reasons they gave for why he had to wear the (so far, completely useless) ballistic vest. _Just typical,_ Shinji thought, _the one that I think of just being institutional paranoia is the one that comes true first. Not that I'm complaining,_ he thought hastily, to the malevolent deity which seemed to be managing his life. _Upset school students can be dealt with. Migou assassins might be a bit more dangerous._

The mismatched pair turned to walk away.

"Wha... I didn't do it on purpose," Shinji complained, hoping to reason with the obviously unhinged boy.

The black-skinned boy turned around, face contorted in rage.

"Leave him alone, Toja," the shorter, bespectacled one said, hastily.

The voice of reason was ignored. Toja yanked Shinji up by his collar, pulling his fist back, red eyes shining.

"Just for that, idiot," he muttered softly in Nazzadi, the tone in his voice beyond rage, I'm going to give you the beating of your..."

"Drop the boy," a synthetic voice commanded. When there was the faintest hint of reluctance, the voice continued. "Do it NOW!"

Shinji was dropped, blood running out of his nose and down his face. He licked his lips, tasting the warm, metallic tang, and tried to staunch the flow as he got away from Toja.

A squad of NEG troopers, stun batons and tasers in hand, accompanied by one of the Mk-5 Crusader powered armours that seemed to have nothing better to do than hang around the Academy, all had their weapons levelled at the tall Nazzadi, who, quite understandably, looked terrified at the gaze from the glowing eyes of five helmets and the four optical sensors of the Crusader.

"Get down on the floor! Now!" the Corporal of the squad, his voice filtered by his sealed helmet.

One of the troopers, a single white band around one arm, rushed over to the now-prone Toja and Ken.

"DNA checks human, no Outsider taint or trace of Hybridisation beyond tolerated gene-pool levels," the trooper, his or her voice cloaked, reported back.

"Secure them, and take them to the OIS examination room, subject to testing for Blanks or sorcerous influence." At that, both Toja and Ken began to shake, as the troopers handcuffed them both, and walked them off at a brisk trot. "Get up, Acedia." Shinji blinked, before remembering that was his codename for non-Ashcroft matters, who insisted on calling him "the Third Child."

"Acedia. Are you injured?" Apparently not trusting his opinion, the one with the white band, who Shinji presumed to be the squad medic, moved over.

_It was really difilcult to tell them apart, when all you had was the synethic voices over the external speakers,_ Shinji thought. Then again, it _was_ sort of the point.

"Scanning. Raised vitals corresponding to an adrenaline rush. Nasal haemorrhage; that's a nose bleed, corporal. Should be fine; the blood will stop on its own, and here's a cloth," the medic added, handing over a thick white absorbent thing to Shinji, who promptly clamped it to his nose.

"He... he just said that he was doing it because his sister was hurt," said Shinji, shaken almost as much by the response of the soldiers, who he was beginning to suspect were part of the OIS, as by the fact that he had almost had quite a beating from an angry individual who was both bigger and stronger that he was.

"Hmm," replied, the corporal, the synthesiser rendering the sound as a word, rather than a noise in back of the throat. "Acedia, you are to accompany Invidia to the Evangelions."

Behind them, Shinji suddenly noticed Rei standing. He could have sworn that she wasn't there a moment ago, although five soldiers and a suit of power armour do tend to block lines of sight and draw attention, in the same fashion that an elephant in a room does, when the room is specifically an abattoir.

He pulled himself to his feet.

"Right," he said, following Rei, who had already started walking off.

This was possibly the second time this day that he had been saved by a girl, and a xenomixed one at that. It depended upon whether the soldiers had been bodyguards, or whether they had been searching for him to get him to go.

"Um, yes. Ayanami, thanks," he said, catching up with her. She walked fast, even with one arm in a cast and still quite heavily bandaged, including a lack of depth perception.

"You had your phone off." Her voice was quiet, soft, and chilling in an almost literal sense. Shinji actually felt actively colder when she spoke. "It was an emergency call, so I went to where you were."

Shinji checked in his pocket. He was sure that the phone had been on, and it wasn't likely that the Class 3 D-Cell was flat. They gave 30,000 mA hours, enough to run the mobile phone for over a year.

The battery was loose. Shinji pushed it back in, and made a note to complain. There was something wrong with the design from the nano-fabricator if a new phone could get so damaged so quickly.

"But... how did you know?"

The answer came back like a perfect volley, level and smooth.

"I knew."

Shinji began to get an idea about how difficult she was meant to be to talk to, even though these were the most words they had ever exchanged.

"Uh, actually I was thanking you for getting the, you know, soldiers. It looked like I was going to be in trouble there, but you showed up at the right time."

"Yes."

Surprisingly, she continued, actually adding to a conversation.

"It is a good thing that I waited."

_Wait, what?_

A siren started up

~'/|\'~

"Today, at 1:21 pm, a special state of authority has been declared by the New Earth Government. All inhabitants within the Arcology are to remain so. All inhabitants with a temporary arcology pass are to leave, and go to their designated shelter within the Greater London Area. Should conditions change, all individuals are to follow the instructions of their nearest municipal authority, inducing heading to the Internal Arcology Fortifications. Temporary martial law is in full effect. Message repeats, today, at 1:21 pm, a special state of authority has been declared by the New Earth Government..."

~'/|\'~

The Fourth Herald cruised at just over the speed of sound, serene in front of the booming roar it left behind as it tore through the air, its AT field tearing those diatomic molecules unfortunate enough to get in its way in two. A trail of free-radicals from these unnatural severances whirled and bloomed in the atmosphere.

The creature was grossly cephalopodian, its bulbous body, bloated and white like a corpse drowned in some cavern hidden from the face of the sun for countless aeons, trailed by vile tentacles. The appendages twitched and writhed in a manner which suggested that they were not fully under the control of the main body, for, were the beast subject to the restrictions of aerodynamics, the movements would have obstructed its flight. They glistened and gleamed; a thin layer of oil-like protoplasm coated their surface, reflecting the light wrong with the tentacles appearing coated with sea one minute and sky the next. Its main bulbous section possessed three great eyes upon it, a triangle of vision which allowed it to watch the skies and seas alike. The eyes did not glow, as a creature from a bad film might, but instead they reflected an iridescent, shifting pattern hypnotic to the unwary eye. And like its deceased kin, it bore a sanguine orb on its front, a sign of the favours bestowed upon it.

As the Kathirat, as the humans called to it conceal its name (ah, the sweetest of ironies), flew over the North Sea, it brought madness to the birds that swarmed over the sea, in pursuit of the recovering fish stocks. It had been astonishing how fast the seas had replenished themselves after the near destruction of stocks in the early 21st century. Of course, the tendency for the Estoric Order of Dagon to board fishing vessels, and take the crews away to be brainwashed into service of dread Cthulhu, Dagon and Hydra, or taken to the rape camps of the EoD, probably had something to do with it. But now the birds abandoned their foods, and swarmed, regardless of species, towards the Fourth Herald. It cared not for them, and they were ripped apart by their intersection with the AT-field, or sent tumbling out of the air, falling like a fair maiden defenestrated by a cruel patrician to the oceans, where the fish which they had so long preyed upon devoured the corpses. Those which had eaten took on an odd iridescence, and dove immediately, to escape the sun.

The Herald would have been pleased, for the food would go to feed the weak, and thus, by feeding the weak, they become yours, yours to control, yours to own, yours to use. They would make good slaves for Her (insofar as such a concept of gender applied to the species to which the Heralds belonged) beloved Children, and food for Her Children.

After all, the Children were the future. The priest was vulnerable, for the first time since the First had been overthrown and slain. The First, her father, had been a good mate, and their Children had been strong.

~'/|\'~

The New Earth Army's central command post in London-2 was in what could accurately be called a state of organised panic. The operators around the edges of the room were using full access to StratNet to co-ordinate the naval assets in the North Sea with the land-based Army aircraft.

"What's the status of the Migou Hive Ship? Can we use a satellite without risk?" Field Marshal Jameson demanded of SpaceCom. The Hive Ship, an armoured behemoth the size of a small moon, 1207 km in diameter, and held with a fair degree of certainty to be Charon, binary partner of the dwarf planet Pluto, or Yuggoth as it was called by its denizens, was the bane of strategic planning. It forced all of the few intact satellites to go dormant, silent under their stealth fields, to avoid their destruction, and thus locked down satellite communications for almost half the planet at once. Moreover, it could dispatch the lesser Swarm Ships, each larger than a Victory-class Battlecruiser, to potentially any place it could see. It was cursed daily by senior NEA and NEN officers, but it had proved proof against coordinated missile strikes from across the globe, failing to even get past its point defences, let alone harsh words.

"Hive Ship is over the Pacific, 121 degrees, 23 minutes, 3 seconds. Satellite requests are permitted," came the answer.

"Well, get Burachev-4 on the Herald. See if the Dimensional Analyser can detect the AT Field. If this works, it can maybe find where these things are coming from."

"It'll be three minutes before its in position, Field Marshal," noted the operator.

On the other side of the room, Field Marshal Lehy was in overall command of the air forces. She closed the comm channel she had open, and called up a new face, floating bodiless before her.

"NEA Norwich, we have a hostile target of extradimensional nature. The previous encounter with its type was found to cause widescale Aeon War Syndrome. Colonel, you are hereby authorised and demanded to utilise the experimental RALCL serum on all pilots."

"Yes, ma'am," the ranking officer at Norwich replied, a specialised fortress-facility designed to protect that part of the east coast from EoD raids, as well as project force over the Sea. Lehy noted the hint of worry on her face. The RALCL (pronounced "Ral-Cal" serum had few noted immediate side effects, but it had never been used on this scale. The potential losses were acceptable, compared to the mass psychological damage that had affected the ground forces which had fought the last Herald, and they couldn't afford to lose pilots, especially when an Aeon War Breakdown was considerably worse when you were piloting a supersonic aircraft.

The third of the Field Marshals, Kora, was back from operations against Iceland, which was completely under the control of the Dagonites, who had turned it into a veritable fortress in the Atlantic. He was in contact with Chicago, the capital of the New Earth Government and the Ashcroft Foundation alike. He was talking to an elderly woman, her white hair tied into a severe bun.

"Field Marshal Kora, the NEG formally instructs you to active the Evangelion Project, and grants you the authority to command it until the current crisis is dealt with."

The Nazzadi officer smiled slightly.

"Thank you, Minister. I shall do so immediately."

The old lady, Minister of War, stared back at him.

"See that you do, Kora. You've asked for this control; now let's see what you do with it. This will cost considerable political capital should you fail."

The Field Marshal saluted his superior.

"We shall not fail, Minister Aristide."

The old lady did not answer, merely cutting the link. The Nazzadi permitted himself a brief smirk, then turned to face the rest of the room.

"We have the authority to activate the Evangelions. Contact Major Katsurugi, and inform her to prepare them."

"Not that they won't be doing that, anyway," remarked Lehy, drily. "If we ask why they're doing it, they'll claim that they're just readying it for training, of course."

"Something will have gone wrong if it gets to land this time," added Jameson. "Is the _Ashcroft_ in position?"

"Yes, it is," answered Kora.

"And multiple wings are on route to intercept. If the serum works, and really does counter Aeon War Syndrome, then this should be a dramatic first test," added Lehy.

~'/|\'~

Four groups of five F-1 Spitfires roared in towards the Fourth Herald at Mach 1.65. Named for their ancient counterpart which had also taken off from Norwich to defend the UK, the nomenclature was all that they had in common with their spiritual forefather. The modern Spitfire was modular, with a single piece wing and an over fuselage structure design. Twin-linked 20mm railguns with limited autotracking and 16 semi-smart missiles that could threaten ground units (although that would be a bit of a waste of their air-to-air functionality) made it noticeably better than its Migou counterpart, the Dart, and left the attempts of the Rapine Storm, who either went for looted airplanes held together with spit and covered in skeletons, or just rode monstrosities (when the creatures tolerated them), in the dust.

And these pilots were better than they would have been normally. The doctors had given them an awareness booster before take-off, for the purpose of heightening their senses, and now they all were feeling more sane, more aware than they ever had before. They may have been intellectually aware that they should be terrified of the presence they hung over keeping pace with it, but there was no fear. There was merely the knowledge that it was their task to kill this intruder.

As one, synchronised perfectly, the wings rolled in, and began the attack on the Herald. Soon, more aeroplanes arrived, and the sky was filled with missile contrails and the snarl of hypersonic bullets.

~'/|\'~

The Kathirat was getting annoyed, for that was one emotion it most certainly shared with the uplifted apes that assaulted its majesty.

The primitive beasts in their metal boxes that could only just touch the higher dimensions dared attack it? Leave its Children motherless?

The stress of the impact of all of the explosives began to tear holes in the AT field, collapsing the phase potentials of the shredded dimensions that permitted a bullet to be stopped. A raking line of fire from a buzzing metal insect punched into its cephalodian skin, flesh that had withstood the wrath of ages pieced and punctured by magnetically accelerated armour-piercing rounds.

Well, it would take their metal boxes from them!

It slowed down, diverting its gift from the Endless to reinforcing the blessing of Yog-Sothoth that enveloped it, especially its top, where the apes wounded its grace. The bullets and missiles bounced off, or were shredded by the strengthened grace of the Gate and the Key. It then added a pair of burning bright tentacles, like false stars, and sliced at the pests, puncturing their crafts and drawing their souls into it. They tasted somewhat familiar, although the Kathirat could not place them. It lowered itself further, its flight slowed by the effort of maintaining its defence against the upstarts.

The Fourth Herald barely had time to feel a presence beneath the waves, like one of the metal boxes, but massively larger, before it realised how it had been tricked.

~'/|\'~

~'/|\'~

The Victory-class Battlecruiser, the _Ashcroft_, one of the prides of the NEN fleet and moved to here from the Atlantic specifically to close this trap, surfaced from beneath the waves like some leviathan from the depths of the minds of medieval sailors. The _Ashcroft_ could sail the voids of space; a little water was nothing to immerse itself in. The air force had forced the Herald low enough that it could target the creature from the surface, instead of having to engage its A-pods, and thus it was all prepared.

Its main, hull mounted Plasma Cannon belched three times in quick succession, draining the hastily installed D-cells that functioned as capacitors and taking almost all the power from the main reactor. Three new-born suns, outshining even the tentacles that the beast extruded, were vomited forth by the steel leviathan. The first was smeared against the AT-field, the ionised gases that it fired dispersed as every single baryon within was given a pseudo-random transformation which excluded the possibility of it touching the Kathirat. The second was partially blocked by the layer of plasma that now clung to the Herald, but it punched through its elder brother, and collapsed the AT-field, boiling away at the hide of the beast with the remnants of its fury, mostly spent.

The third shot tore the Fourth Herald in half, leaving its tentacles and part of its body to fall, severed and partially vaporised, into the ocean. The waters boiled as vast amounts of heat were dumped into them, even as dumb fish swam towards the maelstrom, overcome with an unnatural hunger.

The Ashcroft was not content with that, of course. It followed up its devastating first strike with the rest of its armaments, run off separate reactors. Charge Beams and laser cannons tore at its flesh, punching holes clean through, while further waves of missiles from both the _Ashcroft_ and the air component tore at its armoured carapace. There was no celebration from the pilots or the crew of the Ashcroft, but there were certainly smiles, and declarations of "Fuck, yeah!" in the NEG military command centre back in London-2.

Smiles which disappeared when the Herald, showing speed that it had never before, tore upwards in a hypersonic boom, knocking several planes out of the air with the shockwave that it left in the wake of its still-considerable bulk, leaving a slick of phosphorescent purple ichor floating on the water like some horrific oil.

~'/|\'~

Shinji was positioned on the eastern side of the Arcology, in the middle of a collapsed street of apartments. He had been sitting here, waiting for instructions for a while. It seems that the NEA and the NEN had ambushed the Herald in the North Sea, crippled it, but then it had escaped. He wasn't that pleased about that; they should have just killed it, and then he wouldn't have to be sitting in here. For one, the LCL did absolutely nothing to prevent his bottom going numb from sitting in the control couch.

Suddenly, Misato's head appeared on his HUD. She looked seriously worried.

"Shinji. They've picked up the Herald again! It's dropping in from a low orbit, right on top of London-2!"

Shinji clutched the HV Penetrator closer.

"Where? What should I do?"

"Stay where you are for the moment. We need it to get closer, so that we can work out where it's going to go."

Shinji heard a voice, over Misato's channel, but not directed at him. They obviously had another set of channels open in the Ashcroft Operations Centre.

"Target acquired. AA opening up!"

And a different one, but with the same slightly distorted edge that showed that it was coming over two heavily encrypted channels. Around him, the missile batteries placed around the arcology and over its surface sent plume after plume at the sky, where a cone on his HUD projected its current location and potential landing zones.

"Target is slowing slightly."

Misato turned away from Shinji in the HUD, and replied to that, talking to someone off screen.

"That means that it probably wants to live, rather than just die as a kinetic kill vehicle."

Doctor Akagi's voice interjected into the conversation.

"The AT field is limited in how the phase space can dissipate energy. As it is, the AT field may penetrate through London-2, and even slightly into the armour over the Geocity, but the creature will be crushed. There is no way by arcane physics to dissipate such an impulse. Moreover, it's injured."

It was going in a straight line, Shinji could see, not even trying to dodge the missiles. As the cone got narrower and narrower, its centre still didn't move.

"It's using the impacts to brake!" he blurted out.

Misato stared at him, and nodded, a respectful smile on her face. Then she turned to the other screen, all business again.

"Shinji... the Third Child is right. Could we stop the SAMs?"

"I'm afraid not," the voice answered briskly. "It would cause too much damage if it impacted with London-2 at this velocity. The civilian casualties would be horrific. We'll need you to get the Evangelion over to where it comes down as fast as possible, and take it out. And, maybe," the voice added acerbically, "this time you can not lose control of it."

"Yes, Field Marshal," Major Katsuragi replied in a studiously neutral tone of voice. Her face relaxed, showing that her superior was gone. "Right, Shinji. The Herald is going to hit the Arcology itself, so we're going to have to try something a little unorthodox. Get up the side of the Arcology, at least half way."

A dotted line appeared, projected onto reality, up the side of the pyramid-like arcology.

"But... won't I crush people?" Shinji asked, somewhat desperately. "The outside of the arcology is covered in windows."

"They should all be in the bunkers; they turned the sirens back on five minutes ago when they relocated the Herald. If they get crushed, it's legally their fault," Misato replied, heartlessly. When Shinji hesitated, her voice took on a military overtone. "Do it, Shinji! Be a man, not a child!"

_Yes, be a man and ruin people's houses and possibly crush them to death,_ Shinji though, as he began the climb up the arcology, his foot smashing through the outer wall. It was like climbing a sand dune at times, the sides always ready to give way. He holstered his rifle on his back, and crawled sideways, until he got onto a solid slanted beam, which ran all the way up.

"Hurry up, Shinji," Misato commanded.

~'/|\'~

The Fourth Herald was angry, in a way that passed beyond annoyance, beyond rage, and into the cold, clear waters of diamond fury.

They had wounded it.

They had crippled it.

They had destroyed its tentacles and large amounts of its body. It would be long time before it could bear Children again.

They had dared strike a blow against it. If its kin were to hear about this, it would be devoured as an embarrassment to the species.

Well, it would make them pay. It had learned. They would not be able to use their metal boxes; neither the small, annoying ones, or the large one which had wounded it so grievously, if it were inside the large thing packed with millions of their souls, above the priest. It could feast upon them, mind, body and soul, and then it could claim transcendence, for the saving of its race.

The insects were throwing more of the propelled objects against it. It laughed, a shrieking gurgle that echoed through metal and stone and time

_and deep below london-2 something stirred_

and it plummeted down, buffered by the objects which could not hurt the gift of Yog-Sothoth but merely allowed it to lose its momentum

_ohtheyhavecrippledmytentaclesiwillmakethemallpay_

and as it fell, it noticed one of its sibling's children on the side of the artificial mountain. Well, it would get there first, for the feasting and the anointment.

The Kathirat spread out its tentacles and pieced the Arcology wall like a drill.

~'/|\'~

Ken and Toja had just been released by the OIS, after a series of rather invasive tests (the small holes in the back of their skulls, to check for Migou-induced Assimilation would heal in time, and the cavity search had been... unpleasant), when the sirens went off again.

"What the hell! Not again!" the black-skinned boy moaned.

Ken grunted.

"What? Do you know where to go?"

"I'm not in a very good mood with you at all," he replied, icily. "Because you had to act like a bloody idiot and punch a mecha pilot, who has full bodyguard protection from the fucking OIS, we both got arrested and cautioned. And," he shifted uncomfortably, "probed."

"Listen, man, I had no idea that would happen..."

"Then why didn't you f..."

The argument was interrupted by the ceiling exploding, and a pair of tentacles, burning like the sun, intruding. The two boys fell to the ground, their eyes seared, with their hands clutched futility over their eyes, faces pressed to the ground in the horrific glare.

~'/|\'~

Shinji saw the Kathirat's strike only through its aftereffects. The area was lit very briefly, as if the sun was seven times as bright, then the walls of the Arcology further up exploded.

"It's hit!" Misato yelled.

Shinji drew the Penetrator, and charged up the slope, feet crushing even the reinforced support beneath him. The hole was almost as wide as the Evangelion was tall, easily large enough for him to fit down. He could see the deep wound through the corpus of the Arcology, punching through multiple domes, and, deep down, he could see the flare of the sun-tentacles of the Herald.

Shinji cocked his head slightly. The entry wound was at about eighty degrees to the horizontal.

_Yes. Yes, that should work_

Of course, the punctured domes wouldn't provide a continuous slope to slide down.

_Unless..._

Back in the Ashcroft Foundation's Centre of Operations, Ritsuko Akagi could only stare blankly at the screen.

"What... what in the name of empiricism is he doing?"

Maya looked up at the screen, checking it to the synchronisation data.

"He appears to be... sliding down the hole, ....on an AT field he is projecting in front of himself... while firing the HV Penetrator on full automatic at the Herald. And his synchronisation is in the seventies; 73 +/- 2."

The white coated arcane scientist stared, slack jawed.

"You shouldn't be able to do that!" she finally blurted out. "It... it's like picking yourself up by pulling on your own collar!"

"Cool! Shinji can do that? Sounds a lot easier than A-Theory!" Misato added, in a most helpful way that just happened to have every single individual with a scientific education in the room staring at her in annoyance, rage, disdain, or all of the above.

Shinji, meanwhile, was somewhat more occupied. The Herald had come to a stop several levels down, the raw bulbous flesh where it had been torn in half cancerous-looking to the human eye. The high velocity slugs impacted against the injured Kathirat, forcing through its weakened AT field, and punching into its already injured body. The Fourth Herald shrieked again, and tried to turn, but its weakened body, and the loss of most of its limbs left it slow.

The rifle clicked empty.

Shinji dropped the rifle, and slammed his right hand back, pushing him from a slide to a headfirst dive and triggered the head-mounted laser cannons, which lashed out, caressing the Bearer of Children with the red-coloured wrath of the Third Child. The AT Field was still down, but the weapons punched straight through, over-penetrating the carapace and the porous, spongy flesh.

It was getting really, really close now.

_Now I know what to do._

He stretched out his arms. The burning light coming through from the hole in which the Herald was stuck glinted off his out-reached hyperedged claws and the protruding horn on his head.

He morphed his AT Field into a perfect arrow, falling like a silver blade thrown to take the life of a king. The impact was exquisite, the Evangelion, Unit 01, weapon of humanity released to kill its foe. The Herald managed to throw up a last, stronger Field, which stopped him tearing straight through.

_Just as well,I suppose. I knew it would do that._

But how did I know?

Nevertheless, I did.

The claws got to work, ripping and tearing gouts of phosphorescent purple blood from within the elder beast.

Down below, where Toja and Ken cowered, eyes obscured, the ichor poured down, covering them.

The Kathirat finally acted, in mortal fear for its own life. The sun-tentacles, already weakening in intensity writhed, and plunged into its own corpus, seaking out the upstart who would slay a being which had spawned races and weakened Savaty'ya for Gurathnaka in aeons past (but not this one! Ah, how strange it is!). One missed entirely, guttering and dying like a dying flame as it broke its own hide, but the second went straight through the chest of the Evangelion, with all of Shinji attention focussed on tearing out the innards of the Herald.

Shinji screamed, as a burning pain seared through his chest. Slumping forwards onto the controlls, he squeezed the trigger that fired the Lightning Cannon on the left arm. Hundreds of thousands of amps flooded through the Evangelion, the Herald, and the the area around them, as the charge earthed itself.

Shinji was racked in agony, spasming in the same way that the muscles of Unit 01 did. Around him, the cancerous flesh, so soft against conventional weapons, turned black and singed. Through bleary eyes, he saw the change, and so squeezed the trigger again.

And again.

And again.

Back in the control room, Misato was aghast.

"What the hell is he doing! Why is he acting like that! He's damaging the Evangelion and himself. Shinji, retreat!"

Kozo Fuyutsuki, in Gendo's normal seat, the Representative being absent, leaned forwards.

"He's winning."

Inside the Kathirat, the flesh looked carbonised enough. Shinji knew that that wasn't enough to kill it, though, so he began to crawl forwards and down, hollowing out the Herald with his claws and with his jaws, like a very large maggot in a small apple.

Eyes screaming with pain, Ken and Toja looked up. The burning pain in the form of light was gone. And so they got to see, through tear-filled eyes, the final Child of the Kathirat.

The red orb on the front of the Herald remained bright, even through the injuries to it. That was, until a clawed fist emerged from inside the body of the Herald itself, from within the Kathirat, and started punching it with bladed fingers. It was then joined by its chiral twin, and as the light dimmed, and cracks emerged, by the head of Unit 01, which vomited forth tentacles onto the core.

It was probably for the best that Ken and Toja lost consciousness at that point.

With one final blow, the orb cracked and shattered. The burning tentacle protruded into the Evangelion solidified turning the livid purple of a fresh wound.

And in a grotesque parody of birth, the Kathirat, mother of species, Patron to her Children was torn apart, as the Third Child, finally falling unconscious from the pain, emerged from the bloodied split in the front, tearing the beast apart, and fell to the ground, still connected by the purple fleshy-rope through its midriff.

~'/|\'~

White spoke.

"The Kathirat, if we are to follow the naming convention we had adopted for everyone else, is dead, and more than dead."

Blue spoke.

"Do you suggest that we should mourn."

The ancient man, of Asian appearance but with a North American accent, said those words in the same, deadpan serious voice he used for all conversation.

Green spoke.

"Hardly. It was an idiot beast, maternal yet voracious in its appetites. It was stupid enough to fall for the inept plan of the NEN and the NEA."

Yellow spoke.

"Although, the performance of Unit 01, and its Type 1, continues to outshine Unit 02 and its Type 2."

Red spoke.

"Silence."

There was a hint of stress in her voice.

Green spoke.

"And now that the Kathirat is dead, the path opens to its mate and fellow Patron, and the completion of Xue'Vehulu'Ia'Ia."

Blue spoke.

"We need it, it is true. Ikari,despite being less informed, has a viable substitute, but I would prefer not to leave it in his hands. And, of course, Xue'Vehulu'Ia'Ia would be a useful pawn."

White spoke.

"If Xue'Vehulu'Ia'Ia is a pawn, then we play White. And must strike first."

~'/|\'~


	6. Chapter 5: Rei 01

~'/|\'~

**Chapter 5**

Rei 01

25th September, 2091

Gendo smiled, a hint of genuine happiness entering his smirk. He had got back from Chicago, the capital of the New Earth Government and the Ashcroft Foundation alike to find that the Fourth Herald had been killed. Surprisingly, he was not at his desk, instead standing by a transparent wall, looking out.

Him and Fuyutsuki were in his office, looking over the London Geocity. The temperature had been reduced, to mimic the evening, and trigger the diurnal cycles of the lifeforms which made the Geocity an ecosystem. Indeed, a migration of its own was occurring, as employees of the Foundation flocked upwards and outwards, to their homes in London-2, above. Very few people actually lived in the Geocity, what with the fact that it was more expensive, due to vastly lower housing density, and the fact that even the strongest at heart were somewhat offput by the knowledge that arcane research occurred down here.

Above the transparent dome of the room, the false stars, D-Engine powered lights, began their tracked movement over the ceiling, replicating the movement of the night sky from before civilisation.

"Has the origin of the data leak been traced? AHNUNG are furious with whoever managed to subvert Ashcroft security, and broadcast data from our own security cameras, leaking it to the public, and outing the Third Child to the entire Academy. They seem to be taking it personally. The fact that the Evangelion Project is now public knowledge among the intelligence community, and the public itself knows that there is some kind of large mecha in London-2, seems to have enraged them"

The tone was cold, dispassionate, and studiously neutral, revealing nothing about his feelings. Kozo Fuyutski answered in kind.

"I am afraid not, Ikari. The Magi have not been able to locate the source except in the broadest sense. After it was released, a second virus wiped every single optical or magnetic storage device. We will have to live with the fact that the Project appears to be an open secret among anyone who might know, and the information about it is spreading through the public metanet very rapidly, to the extent that the OIS isn't even trying to slow it. They have decided to go public with a speed that stops those old meddlers from pulling on what strings they have. They're already deliberately leaked a second set of images, of Unit 01 against the Kathirat. SFS-level edited, of course."

"Such a shame. This deliberate blow against the secrecy of the Project has made it impossible for AHNUNG to keep the Evangelions, which are a necessary component of the Human Iteracy Project completely secret. They do not have the NEG completely eating out of their hands; there are other groups with influence, and the vast majority are members of no group."

"Yes. Such a dreadful shame. It is likely that the GIA and the OIS will be poking around, to find out what else is being hidden by Ashcroft."

Gendo looked over his shoulder, smiling broadly, his blank façade cracked.

"Well, we wouldn't want that, would we. It would be terrible if the OIS or the GIA were to find any conspiracies. Of course, they would have considerably more problems telling apart AHNUNG, the Eldritch Society, and the attempts by Chrysalis to get people into the project."

"About that, Gendo," his old teacher said, frowning, "we caught another infiltrator from the Children of Chaos in our intake pool. Someone had tagged him as suspect, although we have no record of that alteration being made in his file. Probably an assassin; he was a Dhohanoid. Someone (another someone, by my guess) had altered his DNA profile to conceal that marker that those monsters all share, thus he read up on clean with scans."

Gendo raised one finger to his temple.

"Don't worry. The Chrysalis Corporation has been having trouble recently with the Eldritch Society, from espionage reports from my network. They don't know what we're doing, they're just poking into secrets. Their master will know, for He always knows. We can only hope that what we plan will amuse Him enough that He will not be bored."

"Gendo," Kozo said, with a hint of irritation in his voice, "you don't need to explain this to me. I know just as well as you do that the Crawling Chaos basically holds veto over the success of our plan, or of AHNUNG's."

Gendo shrugged, adjusting his glasses as the movement caused them to slide down his nose.

"I know. I was just seeing how long I could delay you before you asked me where I had been when the Fourth attacked, old friend. In justification, I did take the first flight back when I heard."

The elder man snorted. "I knew it. Very well, then. Where were you? You knew that the Kathirat was predicted to attack just then."

"Preparing for the reactivation of Unit 00," replied Gendo, any hint of levity gone from his voice. "I had to visit the Auburn Facility in Chicago. I talked with the director of the Herkunft Institute, about Rei. We don't want a repeat of the problems we had with her synchronisity with the previous attempt." He paused. "It is worse that we might have thought. From the omissions in what he said, from what I could tell they were trying to hide, they might be resolving the problems with the Fourth Infant, and thus opening the route to the completion of Xue'Vehulu'Ia'Ia."

The white haired man looked shocked. "Really? They have found a use for the brain-dead shell?"

"So it would seem. We must keep their agents away from the Heralds at all costs."

~'/|\'~

The next day, the day after the death of an entity which had pre-dated the evolution of mankind, its killer, Shinji Ikari, was in pain. Not major pain; nothing had been broken in the fight with the Kathirat, but all his muscles ached, and his fingers felt numb and uncooperative. The backlash from repeated use of the Lightning Cannon at close ranges when one would have normally been enough to reduce him to smoking flesh, had left him with minor neurological damage; damage equivalent to that of a very minor stroke. Of course, the command staff had known about it from the internal biomonitors, and as soon as they had extracted him from the entry plug, they had taken him to an arcanotherapist, where the comparatively minor damage was fixed. However, the new neural tissue was still not an exact replica, and thus he had been warned that he would be clumsy for a few days.

Adding insult to injury, he had been reprimanded by Misato, for the use of the Lightning Cannon in such close proximity. According to her, it had risked damaging both the Evangelion and the pilot, which he had found out the hard way. Unit 01 was having to undergo a full cleansing cycle, because the blood of the Kathirat was both mildly acid, and highly carcinogenic, before the repair cycle to fix the damage which the Lightning Cannon had self-inflicted could even be fixed. He hadn't even been permitted a day off, to recover. It was like... it was like she didn't know really how to treat him. She flipped between treating him as a room mate (and thus leaving him to do the cooking and cleaning), and as her command (in the combat situations). She seemed to try to be somewhat motherly, but she had no experience at that, so just followed what the media told her that a good parent did. And one of the things that were done was that parents did not permit their children to miss school. And thus she did it.

The rest of the class didn't flock around him, like they had yesterday. The talk from the headmaster, and the knowledge that he had been the one piloting the Engel in the images that were circulating the metanet put an invisible barrier around him, one of respect, and almost fear. He looked again. Many of them seemed to be stealing glances at Hikary first, before they tried to furtively stare at him, averting their gaze from him if it looked like she was looking.

_Ah. Another reason for the lack of the swarm. Obviously Hikary had a talk with them. She's like a secret policeman... no, that's not the right word. And where were Ken and Toja? Maybe the OIS hadn't released them yet._

The two arrived late, sprinting in about an hour before lunch, doctor's notes paraded in front of Hikary, who had leapt to "greet" them at the door to the classroom with such speed that she appeared to have not bothered with passing through the intervening space.

"Doctor's note... it's... valid... don't kill us..." panted the out-of-breath Toja, bent double with exertion.

"Not... our fault..." added his equally winded compatriot.

The _amlati_ stared at the two notes, and at their faces.

"_Amli katu wha disnu_..." she breathed in shock.

Both of them were wearing medical eye protectors on both eyes, just like the one that had been over the left eye of Rei Ayanami. These ones looked like blue-tinted goggles.

"Don't worry... class rep," Toja said, recovering his breath. "We're not blind... or anything. They're just protectors... just 'till they recover. Where's the teacher? We gotta hand these in." He waved the pink piece of paper. "Bit stupid if you ask me. Why can't they just transfer the note to our files?"

Hikary shook her head briefly, as if waking up. "This is English Literature, remember. He left us reading the set text for this term."

"We finally got given it?" asked Ken. "What is it?"

"It's a late twentieth century book, part of the science fiction genre. Called..."

"You know, I don't really care," said Toja definitely, adding, after Hikary's look of sympathy transmuted into a laser capable of cutting diamond "... in my current, injured state. We had to wait up most of the night for a free arcanotherapist. Obviously I care about such an important part of my ASCIETs... obviously. I would never disrespect the education system... please don't hurt me," he added, muttering the last bit.

Shinji looked up from his aching attempts to concentrate. The interactions of Hikary and Toja were better than a circus, honestly, he wanted to know how they were injured (although he already had a sinking suspicion, and indeed felt that he might be hit again) and frankly he wasn't in the mood to read. The text just seemed too plodding.

_And, honestly, who really cares about an obscure moon of Saturn? The offworld colonies got destroyed in the First Arcanotech War, and the only moon of Saturn we tried to colonise was Titan._

He looked around the rest of the class. Pretty much all of them had been distracted by the combination of the improvised stand up show and the fact that two classmates had walked in with injuries. Characteristically, the only one still reading was Rei, now devoid of bandages, who was flipping through the pages with detached efficiency.

_My god... is she really already a third of the way through?_

Toja's babbling had come to a stop, while Hikary stared at his face dispassionately. Then;

"So, are you going to tell me what happened, and how you got hurt?" Her voice was surprisingly soft, compared to her previous expression.

"We... um got caught outside when the sirens went off for the second time," Ken replied. "The... the ceiling...the light..." his voice trailed off.

"We... well, you know that the Arcology got attacked yesterday. The thing... the thing, it got into the Arcology. Punched all the way down to the Wade Plaza."

"Yes," replied Hikary, in a slightly confused tone of voice. "The extradimensional entity was crippled by the fleet, then crashed into London-2, where," Hikary glanced over at Shinji, "it got finished off." She saw their faces. It looked like they were staring at her from underneath the googles. "That's what it said on the news."

"There was no way that thing was crippled when it hit," Toja declared loudly. "It had these... tentacle things, but they were burning bright, like the sun, you know, but closer. We got this from just looking at it."

Shinji massaged the back of his neck.

_Oh dear_

An apology was probably best, now. At least here, they wouldn't punch him.

"Um... I'm sorry about that, guys. They did try to kill it before it hit, but the air defences did nothing, and I killed it as fast as I could," he said, holding his arms before him, against his chest. "In all fairness, I killed it as fast as I could."

The head of every member of the class, with the exception of Rei's, swivelled to face him. He ignored them; the ones which mattered were the ones up the front. Toja and Ken appeared to be shocked at the apology.

_That's... probably a good sign. I hope. Please._

"Seriously, there is absolutely no way at all. At all! That you need to apologise to us. At all!" blurted out Toja. "We're in your debt massively... even more," he added, shiftily.

"It was the most awesome thing I've seen in my entire life, ever," declared Ken to the class. "This thing had just broken through the ceiling, with these bright tentacles made out of plasma or something. They certainly looked like a plasma cannon would, if you made a whip out of it, and they made this noise *whuuummm...whuuummm*," he waved his arms around, synchronising the movement to the noise, "when it swung them. We thought we were going to die! It hurt so much! It was so bright!"

"And then," Toja continued, taking up the story, for the accolades, and the fact that it appeared to be distracting the class representative, "and then, it moved those tentacles backwards, punching through the ceiling. We never really saw much of the creature; it was too bright at first, and then we were almost blind. But what I really saw was... there was this... orb on the front. It was wrong... the red... it was weird, not like red should be, you know," he said to the class, who, with two exceptions, didn't. "And then, something tore its way out from the inside of the creature, and starting punching... the orb," he shivered, and blinked, heavily " with claws."

"We kind of fainted with the pain, at that point," Ken said, softly.

"So you didn't see anything else," said Shinji hastily, and with reflection, somewhat unwisely. "Did you get any of the blood on you?"

"No. To both questions. But when the medics found us, we could see the tech teams trying to move the Engel." Both boys glanced at each other, and then walked over to Shinji's desk.

"We owe you our lives," they said, in not-very-well-rehearsed unison. "We're eternally in your debt," said Toja, and "We're forever in your debt," said Ken simultaneously. They glared at each other.

"I thought we agreed on 'etern...'" began Toja, before the applause of the rest of the class drowned out the rest. Even Hikary smiled, faintly.

Rei was still reading. She was up to half way.

~'/|\'~

Asuka Langley Soryu, designated Second Child, and pilot of Unit 02, sat by the mirror in her room, performing the mundane ritual of self-examination and cosmetic products which she carried out twice daily. Once, it had only been had to be performed once a day, but it was happening more and more.

She stared at her face in the mirror. She hated the first part so very much.

Asuka paused, adjusted her dressing gown and got up. She had managed to get a medium sized room in the Beweglichkeit Base, when they had moved Unit 02 forwards, which meant that most of her stuff was still in the house she had been staying in, back in the Berlin Arcology. It was probably for the best; she wouldn't have been able to move, she thought, with it all here. Military bases just weren't big enough. You know, for the accommodation and everything. There was no possible way that she might have too many material possessions.

She put on a thick pair of red, woollen (actually a synthetic fibre, constructed in the nanofactory in this house, but it felt the same) socks, and returned to her seat by the mirror.

_First things first. Contact lenses out, into the cleaning fluid._

There were two faint splashes, as the two flexible lenses sank to the bottom. Asuka avoided the gaze of the other girl, the one in the mirror, who stared back at her. It wasn't her at all. She didn't look like that. Those were not her eyes.

_Skin... remains fine. I won't need another MSH top-up for another few weeks._

This was her skin, shown as it was now. When the MSH was low, she ceased to be herself. She didn't look like that. That was not her skin.

_Hair. My hair. My pride and joy. The first thing to be affected._

I hate it.

I hate it.

I hate it.

The roots are showing. I need to get it done quickly. It makes me look old.

Most of her hair remained a thick, lustrous red, the rich, deep scarlet of open veins. The same red as Mama had had (but she wasn't going to think about that. Not now. Not ever.). But there, lurking at the roots, was the other girl's hair. It wasn't hers. She didn't look like that. That was not her hair.

_I have to put the contacts back in. I can't let Kaji see me like this. He knows, of course, but who would willingly go around looking like a freak? I'm not a freak, not at all._

Not at all.

Asuka could look at herself in the mirror again, her blue eyes staring back. That was her. The examination was done. Now it was time for the lotions, and the other things. She kept herself normal with the first step, now she kept herself looking positively divine, if she could say so herself.

Downstairs, Ryoji Kaji, field operative of the GIA, member of the Blackspire division of the GhOST wing, murderer, spy, parapsychic and double-agent was watching television. Well, not really watching it. Looking at it, and paying attention with a tiny shard of his mind so it gave the appearance that he was watching the escapades of a hyperactive Nazzadi and her sardonic human henchman, while he thought of other things would be a more accurate description. But to a theoretical invisible being watching the room, who had managed to get past the multiple and layered wards against mental projections, Outsiders and sorcerous influences which covered such a high value target, it would appear that he was watching television. This was the first time in a very long time that he had been able to use his own name, his own identity. As a member of Blackspire, this particular mission had required his government profile to be "rediscovered after its temporary loss".

It turned out that he had been working in a low level position in the GIA since he left university, as a data analyst, had anyone broken into his files to find out what he had been doing. To his certain knowledge, there had been three thousand, nine hundred and thirty one attempts to do so as of last Monday, of which twelve had been successful. To be fair, it had come as a bit of a surprise to him that he had been a data analyst all that time (he had thought that he had been legally dead), but he had adjusted, after it had been explained why he was needed for this mission, and why he had to use his natal identity. He was looking forwards to seeing her again.

The phone rang. He picked it up.

"Excuse me, but is this the home of Tanous Reiter?"

Kaji smiled. He thought he recognised the voice, but he had to make sure that protocol was being followed.

"How do you spell the first name?"

"T-A-M-U-S," the voice at the other end replied.

"Well, no, not any more. We only just moved in, I'm afraid."

"I'm sorry for disturbing you. Do you have the new number, then?"

"I think I do. Let me just check." Kaji put down the phone for five seconds, then picked it up again. "Ah, yes, here it is. 456 920 920 445 182 384."

"Thank you very much." There was a click. "Okay, Kaji, the line is secure."

"Good to hear from you, Pax," replied Kaji, smiling. "I'd thought that you and your "boys", and the rest of VREES had forgotten about me when I got moved to looking after the Second Child."

"Now, I'd think that I wouldn't do that, would I," replied the man, in his cold tone of voice. He always sounded like that, slightly husky, made worse by how heavily encrypted the line was. "I was just sitting on a beach, surrounded by beautiful women, drinking a martini, and so I thought of you."

Kaji snorted. Pax on a beach, in that red jacket of his, with that slightly hungry look in his eyes that he always had, was an image which just didn't work. The pale man was a very powerful parapsychic, and made more so by the experiments that GhOST was conducting into remote battlefield command, but people were not something that he really got. Or maybe he got them too well; after all, when you can puppet men, controlling them as marionettes, then normal human interaction is always going to be made difficult by the nagging thought that you can just **make them do what you want.**

"Now, now, Paxy..."

"Don't call me that. I can put up with Pax, but I draw the line at Paxy." A slightly wry note entered his voice, an unusually strong emotion for him. "After all, I'm not Nazzadi and I am not female."

"Sorry. Yeah, without me, the rest of the team wouldn't even know where to find a bar. No, what I think you've been doing is practising infiltration of hostile beaches, and the "beautiful women" was Jin being used as the OpFor and shooting at you with a sniper rifle."

"So you know about Operation CATO, then." It was a statements, without even the customary pause.

"It relates to my current mission, actually. That's all I can say."

"Ah." There was a pause. "So the _Children_ are getting involved, too." A faint chuckle. "How ironic. You think they'll be sending along the adults, too?"

Kaji frowned. He knew the man had a higher clearance than he did, and he'd liked to appear from nowhere, make cryptic remarks, then leave, but he'd used those words before. And the Commander (his nickname in VREES, he wasn't actually in charge) laughing? Something was up.

"I'm sorry?"

He could hear the verbal equivalent of a shrug over the phone. "Never mind. You're assigned to the Second Child, aren't you. She's not the one who's also an infant, too, is she? Childish behaviour?"

Kaji looked around. There was the faint sound of a hairdryer from upstairs, but that didn't mean anything. He didn't put it beyond her to listen in on his conversations.

"Bit of a brat, to be honest. Seems to have a crush on me, although she thinks it's more than that. She lives up to the codename of Superbia. Quite astonishing pride, and didn't respond well to the news that the first Herald kill was made by someone who wasn't her. And even less well when she found out that the Third Child, Acedia, hadn't even been in an Evangelion before."

There was a chuckle over the phone.

"And you haven't told her that Acedia made his second kill yesterday, have you?"

"Well... no. I'm just glad she was training most of today with the Branch and didn't catch the news. Out of curiosity, though," Kaji added, "how do you know about that? Just curious."

"I can actually tell you that; no need to say "It's classified" in an annoying yet cute tone of voice..." the pale man began.

"Pax, I tell you with the greatest kindness, that you couldn't do cute to save your life. And, yeah, Jin is a bitch when she does that."

"True. True. I can affect a man's mind so that he remembers someone being cute, though, which is the same thing. Anyway, it's relevant to Operation CATO. And I got **Mother** to check **Sister**. **Sister** is quite interested in the Third Child."

"Really? I checked **Sister**, before my current mission, and it didn't have much on the Project," said Kaji, with a slight hint of confusion in his voice.

"You probably didn't check in the right way," came an answer.

"Ah, of course. That's why they're moving them to be ready. I'm going to be sorry to miss the black-ops before CATO. That is why you 'phoned me, after all. You were trying to see if I could be reassigned, because you want your pointman back from the nasty evil reassignment of bodyguard."

"Well, partially," the voice admitted. "I also wanted to talk to you. After all, you and the rest of VREES are the closest thing I've ever had to a family. I think."

"That's... well, I'd guessed that before, but I'm surprised that you'd admit it over the phone. Don't get any more sentimental, though," he added playfully, "or I'll be sick from all the sweetness. As sick as I was at certain times in college, like at... some girl's twenty-second birthday party, or that nasty bug I came down around the start of August."

There was silence at the end of the phone.

"Lighten up, Pax. Just a joke." Kaji heard footsteps on the stairs, very light, but enough to know. "Listen, Pax, I'm sorry. And I've gotta go, now. I probably won't be able to talk to you before... the C-word, because these conversations are a pain to set up. Give them hell. After all; they all deserve to die. All the Dagonite bastards."

"They all deserve to die," replied his colleague, repeating the team's motto. "Just think about what I've said." The phone went dead.

Kaji held the phone up, puzzled.

_What justified such a comment? What was Pax doing?_

Was he trying to warn him? Had he heard something about Herkunft and the strange links that 108 companies had to it? And he knew things about the Evangelion Project too, things that Kaji suspected that the GIA as a whole didn't, and which he only knew from certain... anonymous leaks, confirmed by independent sources, once you linked the clues together.

Which made him suspicious, of course. Reality didn't usually work that way, even in the intelligence community.

His confusion allowed Asuka to get the drop on him, grabbing him around the neck with quite astonishing force, and mashing her breasts up against his arm. He resisted the trained instinct to punch her in the face (_target confirmed human, will not risk being bitten_), and roll off the chair, drawing the UT-9 at his hip (_gas-launched needle weapons are subsonic and silent, and will not risk drawing attention_).

_Known capabilities of target do not require the use of hyperspeed or any other abilities._

The full flight-or-fight reflex ran through his head in less than a second, before being suppressed, all completely invisible to Asuka.

"Who were you talking to, Kaji?" came the voice in his ear. She was quite deliberately breathing into it, under the misapprehension that he found it romantic. From... some women, yes. From a sixteen year old; under half his age, no.

"A colleague from the GIA. I think you can understand if I don't say anything more," he added with a chuckle, which sounded perfectly genuine.

Asuka loosened slightly, slumping in disappointment.

"So the Army hasn't got back to you about letting me take the tests to get a commission, then?" she asked, a hint of whine entering her voice.

Kaji twisted to look at her, putting his free hand on the back of his neck, as he tried (yet again) to explain. That was a mistake, allowing Asuka to ensnare his other hand.

"They did... and they said no. Again."

"But why?" she asked, in a sullen tone of voice. "I've got a degree already, I'm the pilot of a war machine that's bigger than any other one in the NEG... that is, any other mecha, they trust me, and need me, that much, I've been through effectively all the experience needed to get the commission, and yet they won't let me take the stupid tests. So, why, Kaji, won't they let me get a commission?"

"Because you're sixteen, remember? You've still got two years of mandatory schooling, even if you already have the degree..."

"Which is stupid in itself," the red-haired girl pointed out. "Why should I be forced to go to a school full of idiots who just happen to be my age, rather than be out there, saving the whole species."

"Well, for starters," Kaji raised as a counter-point, "the ASCIET is more than just education. It's also psychological profiling to check for cult influence..."

"Which I already have."

"It's a rounded education, ensuring that you know about history, language, and logic. You may already have a degree in Natural Sciences, but that doesn't make you a well rounded human being."

_In fact,_ he thought, _it pretty much guarantees that you aren't, given that you've been spending your time pushing ahead of normal society, you've been piloting a Engel-equivalent since before there were Engels, and you've been passed between foster parents. I just really hope that Ashcroft can keep you sane enough that you don't either snap and breakdown in combat, or go on a mad rampage in a giant war machine that would probably take nukes or a capital ship to reliably take down. Because I sort of like you, not in the sense you'd like Asuka, even though you're pretty damaged, and I don't want to see what I've seen happen to you._

What kind of a moron makes the control scheme for a vehicle dependent on using teenagers (or something like that. We haven't been able to get how they are controlled from the Foundation.), anyway? No wonder Engels, which only _require invasive brain surgery superseded their prototypes._

"Yeah. I would have done Arcane Sciences, but they said "No" then, as well. But they're deploying Unit 02 to a forwards base for 'Advanced Field Testing'," said Asuka, making the inverted comma signs with her fingers. "When are they going to give up the stupid fiction that I'm just a 'Test Pilot'!"

"Well, maybe you can show them on the battlefield that you're not just a Test Pilot, then," replied Kaji, trying to changed the conversation. "Anyway, think of what you'd have to give up to become Second Lieutenant Soryu. They'd make you cut your hair, for one."

Asuka flicked her glossy hair, still subtly damp from the recent wash, into Kaji's face. It felt like a velvet whip.

"Oh," she asked, in an artfully innocent tone of voice, "do you like it?"

Kaji knew better than to answer such a loaded question. Sadly, the presence about his neck forced him to give a response. So, as any good GIA operative would have done, he cheated.

"Listen, Asuka," he began. "You're probably going to be told about it tomorrow, but there was another attack on London-2 yesterday."

"What! Why wasn't I told about it earlier," shouted the girl, jumping up, and (he thanked... well, not anyone specifically, but just generically thanked) letting go of his neck.

"Because it was classified. As usual."

"Well, what happened? From the tone of voice you're using, it must not have gone well. It would have been better had they had me there, I bet."

"Actually... no," said Kaji, wincing internally for the outburst he knew was coming. "It was ambushed by a Navy taskforce in the North Sea, and heavily damaged. It got past the ships, though, and broke through the arcology wall. The Third Child, in Unit 01, killed it." He closed his eyes.

After a moment, he opened them again. Asuka had a strand of her hair in her mouth, and was chewing on it, as she stared intently at the other wall. Her left hand was clenched into a fist, its twin still clamped around Kaji's wrist. Then she relaxed, letting go and taking a step back.

"Kaji..." she said, leaning forwards with both hands clasped together in front of her, and a broad smile in her face, "could you maybe see about, if it wouldn't be too much trouble, getting some videos of the Third Child, in his training, and of his two victories so far. After all, if I'm going to be working with him, I should get to see his piloting skills personally, rather than just relying on data and statistics. Please, Kaji, please."

_Yes, I'll see how good he really is. After all, the real advantage of the Evangelions is that they have the AT-Field. That's what makes them better than any other synthorg. And no-one has ever said how hard it is to kill the Heralds, just that they need an Evangelion for it. That just means that they're weak. And so if they let me do it, and I have a lot more than less than two months practice, it will happen a lot faster. Because I'm a better pilot than he is. He probably hasn't even started to have... it show up yet._

And he's an Ikari. He probably only got the position from nepotism. The whole family is useless. It's just as well that Gendo married into that family, or Ashcroft would really be in trouble.

_Wait! Why am I thinking that? It's a little extreme, even about such an upstart, trying to steal my position as pilot of the first Mass Production Evangelion._

Kaji was dubious about the request. He knew the girl was exceptionally competitive, and seemed to take the appearance of the mysterious Third Child from nowhere, to suddenly achieve high Synchronisation ratings which she barely exceeded herself, as some kind of personal insult. On the other hand, an unhealthy obsession with someone her own age _had_ to be better than one about someone twice her age, right?

"I'll see what I can do, Asuka," he said, leaving room to back out later. "The files may be beyond what I can get, but I'll try, okay?"

She nodded her head, a smile on her face.

"Oh yeah, Asuka, and they'll be doing a restart on Unit 00 on Sunday. The First Child seems to have recovered enough from the last time."

He only received a non-committal shrug. Asuka had already decided that anyone who couldn't even managed a start-up sequence was no threat. And Unit 00 was obsolete, after all, a test-bed for the technologies, while Unit 01, as the first proper Eva, was much more important.

~'/|\'~

The phone rang, an unregistered PCPU with its ID tag wiped by an industrial strength electromagnet, using a randomly generated caller identity. The incoming call marked it as from "James Elford", but that was a lie. It was being called by an identical twin of itself. Its owner picked it up.

"Hello?"

It was a middle-aged woman on the other end of the line.

"Heya, just to tell you... well, you know that couple we were meant to be taking out to dinner?"

"The one with the two kids? The younger one's a cute little brat, you know."

"The younger one? Only her? That's not very nice."

"Hey, I report what I see."

"Yes, yes. Anyway, they cancelled on us. Said they have a pre-existing appointment at the _Too Sinned Sins_, that experimental Nazzadi cuisine place just outside the arcology."

"We were meant to be seeing them on Saturday, right?"

"Yes. I'm not actually complaining... well, complaining much. It's still a bit rude of them. But that means I can work. The agency has found me a placement in catering, and I was going to have to reject it, but this way, I can get some extra cash."

"Have you told Many," he pronounced the name as you would 'manny', "about this. She was complaining about being short on cash last time I saw her at a gig."

"Yeah, actually I have. She's with the same agency, and got the same placement. That's nice, because she's a bit confused, and I can make sure she turns up on time."

"It's a bit unusual for a restaurant to be hiring so many temp staff at once. Do you know why?"

"Not really. It might just be a bug, or a busy night with a lot of books, or a big party. But I heard, on the grapevine, that a bunch of staff had been like... attacked, arms broken, fingers crushed, beaten senseless with a pool cue, so I'm guessing they got drunk as a group after their pay came in, and tried to pick a fight with people they underestimated."

"Well, sucks to be them, but it's good for you."

"Yeah. I'm not complaining about extra cash. What are you going to be doing, now that we have Saturday free?"

"I thought I'd probably go out and get a meal with Jonathan. I still owe him for the last set of concert tickets, so this might be a good way to discharge my debt, and then, maybe hang around, you know, trying to see if we could get into a club for free."

"Well, make sure you're on time for the big day. We wouldn't want you to be late for the surprise party. You're meant to be finding the location, after all."

"Yes, mother."

"Mother!"

"I kid, I kid. Listen, I've got to go; my break is almost over, and I've got to get back to work."

"Awwww. Are the hard taskmasters of a reliable, consistent job, which means that you have no problems getting food on the table, getting to you. My heart bleeds, it really does."

"See you, sometime, then."

"See you."

The line goes dead.

The man pockets the phone, and finishes the drink he got from the small nano-factory, chucking the can into the recycling receptacle. He still has to finish coding that modification to the EFCS for the restart.

It's just annoying when work and your private life clash in this manner.

~'/|\'~

_Monday, 17th August, 2091___

Representative Gendo Ikari stared at the projected screen. He adjusted his glasses, pushing them back up onto the bridge of his nose.

"Activate."

The buzz of the Technical Centre started up again. Status updates came from all the technicians

"Focus on yourself, Rei," ordered Dr Akagi. "You need mental fortitude to interact with the synthorg."

Rei turned inwards, her mind calm and cool, an ice-still pool in a blizzard.

The root of the mind is the culmination of emergent effects on an immature neurological morphology. Trace the roots, and I am the end result.

What's the first thing I remember?

"What's the first thing you remember?" Her own face loomed out of a fog towards her, seemingly projected from the inside of the Evangelion. She was almost invisible to herself, white skin, white hair, only the faintest dusting of grey around her pupil. Only inside her mouth was the faintest hint of the red blood that coursed beneath her skin; even her lips were white, tinged slightly with blue, like snow under a full moon.

She accepted the appearance before her. If she were to become the Evangelion, then it would become her. That was simply logical. She did not fear the loss of self. Why fear which you did not have. She was a fact. Someday she would cease to exist, and then the statement of reality that the individual that had been named Rei Ayanami existed would be false, and it would return to the state in which it had been beforehand.

She was but a momentary aberration. This was a fact beyond her existence, because it would remain true for her, even as it would for the rest of humanity, when she had ceased. It was a comforting thought. It would be a terrible thing if you meant something in the cosmic scheme of things, for when you ceased, the other things which depended upon your existence would also cease. Through meaninglessness, she was free.

She stilled those thoughts from her mind, and turned inwards again.

_An exclamation, a bestial shriek of pain and anguish, like a trapped beast. But worse than that, for it was unmistakably human and female, a terrified cry of denial._

"Noooooooo!"

Another voice. It may have been the same, or it may have been another one, but it was young, female and desperate.

Was it her own voice?

"_What are you doing with her!"_

She, her past self, opened her eyes. The blurred light hurt. Everything else was the same white fog, and another face, seemingly massive, filled her entire field of vision. It stared back at her through glasses covered in data read-outs, the black hair and neat beard the only dark patches in this luminescent white fog.

Rei Ayanami stared at Gendo Ikari (a younger one, her current self observed) _for the first time ever. And then he spoke to her, in a soft tone, barely above a whisper._

"You will show men that they do not need gods."

Rei stared back at him blankly. She could still hear the screaming in her ears. That was anomalous, for she could not identify any entities capable of making such a noise, and she knew, despite the lack of indicators, obscured by the (illusionary, a product of memory, by her estimation) fog that concealed her eyes, that no-one was trying to communicate from outside the Eva.

Puzzling.

And then it happened.

"Pulses are flowing back!" The alarmed voice echoed through the Technical Centre, as red elements began appearing on AR projections all over the room. This was the cue for a cascade of warnings from the techncians.

"Trouble in the Third Phase!"

The orange Evangelion, still painted in colours which indicated its test status, unlike its siblings, strained and thrashed against the bindings, and the powered armour which contained its flesh.

"The pilot's nerve readings indicate that she is synchronising, but the Evangelion doesn't seem to be synchronising to her!" reported Aoba, from the right of the room.

"Impossible," declared Ritsuko. "The Synchronisation Function is a linked operator. You can't have a one-way synchronisation with an Evangelion! Evangelions do not work that way!"

"Rejections in the central nerve elements. They're all slamming shut," added Hyuga.

As the Evangelion strained, an odd wave of static washed over the communications equipment. It faded. As Unit 00 exerted itself more and more, the static came louder and longer.

"Cease the procedure!" commanded Gendo, without taking his eyes off the uncontrolled synthetic organism.

"Cut all contacts now!" ordered Ritsuko. "Release all circuits up to number 6!"

The instruction came up negative.

"I can't! It's not responding! The signals aren't being received," said Maya, in a panicked voice, as her hands worked furiously over the keyboard.

The Evangelion surged, tearing its shoulders free from the binding that restrained it. As the tiles of the test chamber fell to the floor, the lights above the Evangelion all failed, blowing in a shard of hardened plastics. In the technical centre itself, the lights closest to the large class window began to flicker, giving a strobe effect upon those closest to the out-of-control mecha.

"There's a strong EM field in the chamber, even though there shouldn't be anything capable of making it," reported Aoba.

_Nice to see that he's keeping cool_, thought Ritsuko. _Now, if I can just survive this, I can let myself have a panic attack later._

"Mental contamination! Mental contamination!" blurted out Maya. "Mental contamination, despite the fact that Unit 00 isn't synchronising with her!"

_On the other hand, a panic attack now might be appropriate. Or maybe catatonia from stress._

No, I won't let myself do that.

Gendo stared as the giant orange mecha clutched at its head, roaring. It swung its fist in a perfect arc, smashing into the left side of its face. The head armour fractured, the white skin underneath quickly obscured by the red blood that welled out, running down the orange armour, giving it a new, barbaric appearance.

"Not as planned," he muttered to himself, softly enough that no-one else could hear. He raised his voice. "Abort the experiment. Eject the D-Engines. Retrieve the Pilot!"

The orders were carried out, with a smashing of glass and a pulling of the big red-and-black lever. Even nowadays, the best compromise between the ability to shut something down, while minimising the risk of accidental activation was the button under emergency glass.

The Class-B D-Engines were ejected from the 40 metre robot, one for each limb, and another bank of four from the small of its back. That was one of the perennial problems with the Evangelions; they were much larger than conventional mecha, and even the Engels, but not large enough to use a Class-A D-Engine, the same one used by the Battlecruisers and major power distribution plants, forcing them to use large numbers of D-Engines. This had been taken into account by the designers.

"Unit 00 has switched to back-up power," announced Maya.

Ritsuko started swearing loudly in her head. These curses were mostly directed at her mother, but she saved quite a few for Yui Ikari and Kyoko Zepplin Soryu. Yes, they had taken into account the fact that the large number of D-Engines left the possibility that one or two might be damaged, and thus designed the Units to contain back-up supplies, D-cells operating as capacitors, to allow them to function at full efficiency for a short period even if the main engines were damaged.

What they appeared to have not taken into account was the fact that the Evangelions were vicious monsters which had a complicated and dangerous method of starting up which risked losing control and going on a fucking rampage (and didn't members of the Engel Project who knew about the Evangelions know it! They loved pointing it out at scientific conferences. "Oh, Dr Akagi? Good to see you. Would you like some tea? It's made in a long, unnecessarily complex and completely inefficient way. But don't worry. We haven't had a rampaging kettle since last Saturday, and the nano-fabricator has hardly ever killed the repairmen. Aha!" It was so unfair, especially since Engels did occasionally kill people if someone without an ESI implant tried to get in, or the pilot was knocked unconscious, or if they'd used the emergency shutdown feature recently, the Engel was in a bad mood, and it had a chance. Insufferable pricks. Oh yes, and she hated her mother too, for that stupid design decision.) Who the hell had let the power switch occur automatically! She swore, at the next re-fit, she was going to make it so that there was a hard-wired necessity for the pilot to flick a switch to activate the back-up power.

Meanwhile, of course, there was still a rampaging giant robot-thing with claws and spurred feet. Thank goodness they had deactivated the weapons-systems, was all she could say.

The comms link from the Evangelion crackled to life, filled with static. It sounded like the First Child.

"...*crrrsh*...ll...deser*crrsh*... *crrsh*e"

"Rei! Rei!"

There was no response. The Evangelion continued to move, lit only by the emergency lighting, and then only intermittently, giving a tableau of freeze-frames tinted by red. While Unit 01, one week later, would roar as it tore apart Asherah, Unit 00 _screamed_, a vile dissonant resonance like that of a natural disaster, not some mere lifeform.

It slammed its fist just above the clear viewscreen. The fist went though the wall, ripping and tearing the superstructure of the building. The room had been built to contain an Evangelion in a full rampage. It was failing.

Blood began to drip from the hole, rich and almost black, so dark was its colour. And in much greater volumes than the damage to the armour plating of Unit 00 should have permitted. The second hit the viewscreen, and was stopped. The entire window had been made out of diamond, and was actually the strongest part of the room, in part because it had been calculated that it was the most probably target for a rampaging Evangelion.

But against the unnatural strength of Unit 00, even diamond had its limits. Fractures cascaded over the surface of the clear material, the worlds most expensive depiction of a spider's web. The entire frame screamed, as metal twisted and tore under the force transmitted to the window.

Gendo could hear a faint giggle, or at least the memory of a giggle, as he watched his plan fall apart.

"Force an ejection."

"But Representative! The pilot is likely to suffer severe injuries if we do it..."

"Do it now," he ordered.

_It's better this way, than the alternative. Oh, Rei..._

The back of Unit 00 opened up, as the tubular entry plug was ejected in a plume of gas. Gendo winced as the on-board A-Pod, powered by an internal battery kicked in. It was designed to send the plug far away, away from the threat which forced and ejection. All it succeeded in doing was slamming the tube into the ceiling, where it snaked its way cross, before slamming into a wall and falling, landing with a sickening thud. Gendo was already sprinting down to the fallen plug when the Evangelion shut down from lack of power, the automated systems locking down any attempt to move.

_My... whole body hurts. I appear to only have one eye operational. I will need a replacement grown. From the intense agony reported to me by this body, I would suspect that there is a source of intense heat nearby._

Rei looked around the cylinder.

_I am impaled upon the broken control sticks. They have entered my lower abdomen. Given the fact that I am able to move my feet, there is no spinal damage. I will not attempt to remove myself from them, for fear of causing extra damage._

She coughed, LCL leaving her lungs. The vortices that it induced in the fluid could be seen by the blood which emerged with it.

_The heat is probably coming from the filaments within my suit. The damage seems to have caused them to malfunctioned. I am being cooked alive._

It is exceptionally painful.

Rei realised then that she was screaming.

The blood from her lungs swirled around in the currents caused by her lungs trying to empty themselves. She pulled herself off the control stick (it had pierced her plug suit, she could see), which prompted a fresh flow of blood. The foam within the suit staunched it, but she was feeling faint, indicating that her brain was suffering a problematic lack of oxygen.

_By removing the short circuit in the suit, I will not die. However, I am badly damaged. It is fortunate that I have no spinal damage, because that would mandate six months for the regrowth and reforming of connections._

She could hear a voice from outside, screaming in turn. The door opened, letting the LCL flow out in a bloody torrent, and there was light.

Representative Ikari stared at her, slumped back in her seat, her face obscured by her hair, and her white plug suit marred by the yellowish-grey sealant foam, soaked in blood.

"Rei," he said, tears running down his face, and a look of intense agony on his face. "Rei, are you all right?"

Rei turned to face him, a grim façade soaked in blood and LCL, blood oozing from her punctured eye socket. She nodded.

"Good." The relief on the Representative's face was palpable. He collapsed to the floor, curled in a foetal position, as the agony of his hands then overwhelmed him.

The first medical team called for a second one.

~'/|\'~

Five individuals dived into the pool. Four splashed upon entry, but one cut into the water like a knife, leaving barely a ripple in her wake. Under the water, her pallid presence was masked, visible only by the black swimming costume she wore. The white walls of the pool were camouflage enough.

She won, of course. Ayanami Rei always won in swimming races, to the extent that unofficially the sports teacher had decided that she was automatically in first place in any school leagues, and thus judged places, and awarded prizes, on the assumption that she wasn't taking place. She was at home in the water, in a way that the other girls were not.

There had been snide comments about Hybrids and Deep Ones from the girls who cared about always losing to her, but Hikary, upon hearing it, had pointed out that there was no way that a Hybrid would be allowed into an arcology, as they show up on the genome scans, and furthermore passed the names of anyone she heard repeating the rumours up to the headmaster, whereupon detentions descended, like manna from the heavens. Not out of any personal friendship for Rei, merely due to the fact that the rules stated that such slanderous rumours were not permitted.

Rei was alone in the world. Like a large natural diamond, a cold, hard-edged wonder, valued by others, but locked away to keep it safe. If asked, she would have said that she preferred it that way, but who can distinguish between desire and the lack of comprehension of the alternatives?

She got silently out the other end of the pool, and walked around to take up exactly the same position where she had been sitting before. She stepped around one of the maintenance staff, a dark-skinned woman drying the floor around the pool, to prevent slipping, without looking or responding to her presence. It was not a necessary thing. While the other girls congratulated the "winner", she sat, and stared into space.

The Academy separated the genders for certain sports. Swimming was one of them. It was cited that studies had shown that both sexes swimming together resulted in distractions and the possible development of body-image issues.

When the fact, that almost all of the boys not actively participating in the basketball game were trying to stare through the glass wall of the swimming centre, was taken into account, the studies were probably correct.

Toja was almost salivating, as he gazed at the distant figures. Even from that distance, it could be seen that many of them were dripping wet. The mandatory enforcement of a school swimming costume, one of the few items of clothing not to have a Nazzadi variant, somehow made matters worse, as the hormone-driven male imagination worked overtime to fill in the concealed parts.

"Man. All the girls are so hot. They've all got great breasts..."

Ken raised an eyebrow at him.

"Careful, man. That's probably sexual harassment. At the very least, it would have Hikary down on you like a tonne of... very pointy nails. Mind you, frankly that gaze is sexual harassment."

"You could at least stop staring at them yourself, if you're going to point that out," Toja raised.

"Not a chance. I didn't say I was opposed to it, at least when the view is this good. And if you looked away, that means that there's more of them for the rest of us."

"That's really not how it works, you know. Eh, Shinji?"

"Wha?"

Shinji was, along with the other bearers of an XY chromosome not forced to engage in physical activity, staring at the glass back of the swimming pool. Unlike the fellow males, he was not doing it out of a sense of hormonal lust. He was just looking at Rei Ayanami, trying to figure out the other pilot.

Really. He assured himself that, although she was very attractive, in a sort of cold, foreign way, he wasn't paying attention to that. Any attempts to compare her to the other girls were not happening.

Honestly.

"You are staring at them, even worse than Toja does, you know," said Ken, in a tone of voice that should be classified as a public indecency. "You... like someone, don't you?"

"Rei Ayanami, by any chance," added Toja, in exactly the same tone of voice.

"Uh... no, n...not exactly..." began Shinji, stammering. He may have been, but they'd just misinterpret his not-in-any-way sexual interest.

He wondered to himself why he was being so feverish in denying that he had an interest. Could it be because he had seen her with his father? Chatting to him in a way that Gendo had never been with him? Actually smiling? Being treated like a daughter by his father?

_No, it wasn't exactly that._

His deep, introverted introspection was broken by Toja, using a deliberately childish voice.

"So... Shinji likes Rei, Shinji likes Rei."

"But what about her, do you think," began Ken, in a deliberately leading tone. "Her legs, perhaps?"

"Or maybe her tits?" continued Toja. "Or the fact that she's a _sidoci_, and it is a fact proven by surveys that both _amlati_ and _sidoci_ are exactly ten percent hotter than an equivalent human or Nazzadi."

"Or those china-coloured calves, and the way that they merge into the rest of her leg," added Ken. He looked at the stares he got from the other two. "What?"

"You like her too? Why are you so interested in legs in particular," asked Toja.

"Well, a little," Ken admitted. "You have to see that she's hot."

"Anyway," said Shinji, trying to get the conversation back on topic so he could quell the potential rumours once and for all, "that's not it."

"So what is it?" said Ken, sceptically.

"Well, I was wondering why she always seems to lonely," began Shinji.

"And you wanted to be the one who comforted her," finished Toja. "Seriously, man, that chat-up line sucked. It wasn't even amusing, like, say, 'Are your clothes made by the Migou, 'cause we need to get rid of them!' Or 'I wish you were a mecha, so I could take you for a ride!' Yeah, so they are pretty bad. But they're at least funny, and girls love a sense of humour, right?"

Shinji stared at him blankly for a second, then, "Okay. Two things. Firstly, those were terrible. Really. Hearing them was like dribbling acid into my ears. Please. No. Just no."

"I'm sorry, Toja, but I'm going to have to second that. Save those chat-up lines for... say, one of those Nazzadi Culture girls, like Taly, say, so they can get Hun Zuti on your arse," added Ken.

"Hey. They're not that bad, and I know Hun Zuti, too. I can defend myself, and my honour, in unarmed combat."

"Okay. Just let me finish explaining, and then we can drop this subject, never to return again. Okay. Right," interjected Shinji. "It's just that, if she's a pilot, too..."

"Aha! So she is an Evangelion pilot! I suspected it, ever since I noticed that you two always seem to leave early on certain days," announced Ken triumphantly.

"Yeah. And you didn't hear it from me, okay. You just put it together, and told Toja. Anyway, if she's a pilot, I should know more about her."

Ken and Toja looked at each other.

"Well, we're blank, too. She's been here as long as we have; hasn't made any friends, doesn't talk to people," said Toja.

"She's got a sort of reputation of an ice queen, who doesn't talk to anyone, always seems to excel at school and at swimming, but doesn't push herself any further. Like, she's got a bad attitude," added Ken.

"I heard some teachers bitching about her a while ago, when I got sent to the staff room by the Secret Policewoman. Complaining about how she didn't volunteer for anything, how she could make the Academy swimming team brilliant, but apparently refused even when it was heavily suggested that she take part." Toja paused. "Anyway, should you at least talk to her. It's more than we can do, but you've got to communicate with someone you might have to fight with. Uh, along side, that is."

"No, we... barely speak," Shinji replied, pausing. "I was hoping someone else might know more."

"Nope."

There was silence, as the noises of male competition were joined by the slight buzz which followed the interior climate changing, and the temperature dropping.

~'/|\'~

Shinji got home on Friday, to Misato's house, to find an acrid smell coming out of the kitchen.

He sniffed. It was... like someone had been trying to fry chilli seeds, spicy sauces, bacon, and some long grained rice, using chilli oil in the pan. The scent prompted a fit of coughing.

"Oh, heya Shinji," said Misato, as she walked out of the kitchen, seemingly unconcerned by the burning (both in the sense that it was the product of burnt food, and the fact that _it hurt his nostrils_) smell. "What's the matter?"

Overcome, Shinji groped towards the door, and took deep breaths of the cleansed arcology air.

"Yeah, Rits-chan is meant to be coming over for dinner, so I thought I'd prepare the food. It went a little wrong, although it's still edible."

Shinji doubted that, or at least doubted that the species for which it was edible was humanity. Maybe some creature that lived in volcanoes, feeding off the liquid magma. And even that would probably say, "My, you do like the chilli stalks a lot."

"So I thought we could go on a little outing. There's a really good new restaurant just outside the arcology, went there a little while ago, and the food was great. Experimental Nazzadi cuisine. Brilliant. Seriously, it's one of the best things their search for a culture has produced. You'll have to change, but it's not that formal."

From the safety of the entry, Shinji saw Pen-Pen poke his head out of his fridge. There was a choked "Wark", and the door slammed shut again. From the slight humming from within, it seemed that the penguin, at least, was prepared for this kind of use of chemical weapons, and had installed some kind of machine which filtered the air within the fridge.

_And for the moment, I will ignore the fact that there is a sapient penguin living in a fridge who can install a detoxifier on his own. Which probably means he has his own bank account, to operate the nano-factory, as Misato probably wouldn't pay for it herself. There are some places I will not go._

"And, as it means that we're going outside of the arcology, I can justify using the car!"

A reflection of the nausea Shinji knew that he would be feeling travelled back in time, leaving him to clutch his stomach.

"Misato," he began. "One question."

"Yes?"

"How... just how do you manage to burn food, when you have a nanofactory which can assemble it whole, with the right recipe downloaded from the PAN."

Misato smiled broadly, and sauntered over to the refuge of the door.

"Ah, Shinji. You've got all of student life ahead of you. You'll learn when you're too poor to buy recipes, and have to learn to cook for yourself."

Any attempt to point out that a) he already knew how to cook and b) most of the time, he did cook, getting the nanofactory to make the ingredients rather than buy a meal template, was overwhelmed by a fresh wave of coughing.

~'/|\'~

Actually, the restaurant, after he had gotten over the nausea induced from Misato's driving, wasn't that bad. It was decorated in a manner best described as techno-Arabian Nights, with lots of brass, neon lighting, and geometrical designs everywhere. And although the food was sold as "Experimental Cuisine", the owners had been smart enough to realise that by making it truly experimental, they were alienating too much of the market, and so actually made a bunch of dishes which, although superficially quirky, were actually quite edible. And they did chips for fussy children.

Misato would have none of that pandering to the common tastebud and its proclivity for not being burned to a crisp by pure capsaicin extract, and had promptly wandered off to find various chemicals to add to her coconut-oil fried rice dish.

Ritsuko stared across the table at Shinji.

"You know, I'm surprised you're still alive." She waved a hand in the air. "From the cooking, I mean. I smelt that apartment, and... well, I'm shocked the sniffers in your rooms didn't activate. On the other hand, the men monitoring Misato's building probably have experience. Or they just don't care any more."

"Uh... well, actually, I cook most nights, and I think I've managed to get it so she... well, that is, most of the time, she just downloads a meal rather than trying to make one from raw ingredients." He shuddered, a legacy of remembered pain. "The next stage in Operation: Not Die From Misato's Food will be to train her not to put all the condiments in the mean itself, rather than just on her plate."

Ritsuko snorted. "Good luck with that. I tried that at university. Failed. Was forced to eat her chilli rice once. She was under the impression that the recipe asked for two kilograms of chilli, rather than 20g." She rolled her eyes. "Science, and that includes accurate measurements, has never been a strong point of the Major. Try not to ruin your life under the influence of a bad room-mate."

"I'm sort of used to it. I'll just look at it as good practice for, you know, child raising." He shrugged. "I think Pen-Pen worships me as a god, you know. I'm the one who feeds him, most of the time," Shinji added. "He actually gets fish, not just curry ramen." He raised one eyebrow. "How on earth does a person end up with a sapient penguin as a roommate, anyway?"

Ritsuko shifted, and looked distinctly uncomfortable. "Well, it's a long story. A long, and rather complic... wait. Is that Lieutenant Aoba over there?"

Pretty sure that it was just a distraction, Shinji nonetheless looked. It actually did appear to be the long-haired computer technician over there.

"I think that's him. It would be a bit of a coincidence, given that there's, what, 20 million in London-2."

"I wonder what's he's doing here."

"Having a meal, maybe?" Shinji pointed out.

"Yes," said Ritsuko, in a very _precise_ manner. "The trite, trivial, factual and yet utterly useless answer. Nice to see that you're maintaining your standards, Shinji. The point I was making was that I thought he was meant to be going to one of his metal concerts tonight."

"Well, the one he's with... is it a man or a woman. Long black hair."

"It's a man," stated Ritsuko, definitely. "The build is wrong for a woman."

"Well, that's a sort of metal hairstyle, right. Maybe they wanted a meal beforehand?"

"You may be right. I'll note it down, nonetheless."

_Note it down_, thought Shinji. _Why? Isn't it a bit paranoid to be so attentive to a member of your staff being at a place where they have a logical explanation to be, just because you didn't think that you'd see them._

A waitress trotted up to their table, a young _amlati_, maybe about 20.

"Hi!" she exclaimed. "Is everything okay with your meal?"

"Yes," stated Ritsuko, shuddering slightly at the voice, which grated at her nerves.

"Would you like anything else?"

The doctor shrugged. "Uh, yeah. Get me another beer."

Shinji raised a hand. "No thanks, I'm fine."

"Thank you very much!"

Ritsuko shuddered when the waitress had left.

"So. Very. Annoying. Even more annoying than that Nazzadi couple over there with the kids. The younger one won't be quiet. Someone should shut it up. Where is Misato, anyway?"

"She..." Shinji scanned the area. "She...appears to have got distracted while looking for sauces. She seems to be... drinking with some man, over by the bar. Over there." He pointed, where Misato stood by a tall Nazzadi, the green light washing over her skin.

Ritsuko turned to look. Then she slowly raised her palm to her forehead.

"She's such a cheat."

"Pardon?"

"Oh, right? You don't know?" She looked at his expression. "Right. You ever wondered why she is so very, very bad at cooking? It's because... well, she's terrible, there's no doubt about it. Always has been. But in the Fall of New Kuala Lumpur, she took a hit from an acid weapon from some extradimensional monster that the Rapine Storm took with them. Burned though the front of her Blizzard, and some of it got on her face, though the inside of her machine. It missed her eyes, but left her with horrible burns on her face; took off most of her nose and ruined her tongue. When they evacuated her, they didn't have any free arcanotherapists, and so she only got mundane treatment. Left her with almost no sense of smell or taste. They ended up replacing the organs, but the damage affected her brain somehow, and so she still can't really taste things properly. That's why she always uses so much sauce. She couldn't really even smell the apartment. She's trying to taste anything, to feel anything..."

The doctor's voice trailed off into nothing. Shinji felt embarrassed. He'd treated her cooking as an amusing character trait, and looked down upon her inept attempts to cook.

_Yeah. I was laughing at a disability. That's terrible. I'll need to make it up to her._

"And so she cheats at these drinking games. That thing she has. It's a Burning Well. A bunch of hot (that is, they taste hot) chemicals dissolved in oil, floating on top of water with their counter-agents dissolved. You're meant to drink the top half, swill in in your mouth for as long as you can, then drink the rest and down it. But if you can't taste the stuff in the oil..."

"... you can always win," finished Shinji. And indeed, with tears in his eyes (from the burning sensation in his mouth), the Nazzadi was withdrawing a noticeable wad of terranotes (and they were rare enough in hard form, given that most transactions were done by card.)

"Anyway, yes." Ritsuko snapped her fingers. "That reminds me. Well, not directly, but now I remember, can you give this new Ashcroft Protocol Access Card to Rei, the next time you see her. Before the start-up on Saturday. I missed the chance to do it myself, and I'm going to be busy preparing for it."

"Why me?" asked Shinji.

"Because you go to the same school as her, because you're her co-worker, and because there's more chance of you having time than me, to name just three reasons," replied the blond.

Misato leaned over Shinji's shoulder, and grabbed his hand.

"Oooh, what's that there?!" quoth the raven-haired woman.

"Just Rei Ayanami's new APAC. I told him to give it to her."

Misato, meanwhile, was staring at Shinji's.

"What's the matter? You seem to be staring at Rei's photo very intently."

_Oh no,_ thought Shinji. _Not from her as well!_

His wishes came to naught, though, as Misato teased him about throughout the rest of the meal, only stopping to briefly swear as the car refused to start due to her failing the auto-breathalyser test, to resume on the public transport, and only dying out when she got bored.

He supposed that he could have protested, and she would have stopped, but, frankly, being laconic was both easier and more enjoyable than being hot blooded. He suspected that his refusal to rise to her suggestions (which were getting more explicit as the alcohol in her blood kicked in) was in fact making her continue, but he could have the last laugh.

He could turn on Child Safety Mode on the nanofactory. She'd never be able to turn it off while hung-over.

~'/|\'~

"Well, it's been fun, Jonathan, but we should probably get going if we want to make the concert on time," said Lieutenant Aoba. "You should probably ask for the bill; I'll pay."

The young _amlati_ waitress trotted over.

"Have you finished?! Would you like to pay?!"

"Yes, we have finished," he stated, clearly. "I'll pay."

"Right that it!" replied the waitress. She patted her pockets. "I'm sorry, but I think I left my Ident Reader over by the bar. I'll go fetch it."

Johnathan nodded to the waitress, who nodded back, a broad smile on her face. He slipped a piece of paper into her apron.

Shigeru Aoba rolled his eyes. "Must you, at every opportunity? She's quite a bit younger than you, you know."

Jonathan shrugged. "She smiled back, didn't she," he replied, in his broad, Yorkshire accent. "Not my fault that I'm so devilishly attractive to women."

The Nazzadi couple with the noisy child, a toddler, of perhaps three years old, and an older child of about seven, were trying to quieten down the younger one. Or, at the very least, the mother was, talking quietly in a soft, intense tone of voice. The father, a sallow looking man, insofar as such properties could be distinguished in an individual with coal-coloured skin, was complaining to the staff about the medium rare guinea pig being over-cooked and over-spiced.

In the substation a few hundred metres away from the restaurant, a small explosive charge placed on the superconducting cables carrying power from the grid blew, plunging the area into darkness.

The dining area was plunged into near total darkness, with only the emergency exit signs providing illumination, not enough for any human eye to see what was happening in the room. Luckily, that was not what was required.

And a very specialised sensor might have noted the slight change in air pressure induced by four smaller objects suddenly becoming larger.

It was not speech, but it was akin to it, an organic system of communications which included body position, fifth dimensional extrusions, and even thought. It was as if you had the memory of them speaking, without it having to pass through the ears.

And what Deva spoke was "Go!"

Tagers did not need normal levels of light. Without exception, every one of the Ta'ge symbionts gave their hosts the ability to see perfectly well in any level of light. Of course, all of their malformed siblings, the Dhohanoids, had exactly the same ability, and furthermore had that in all their forms, which somewhat negated the advantage. In addition, all pure Nazzadi and _sidoci_ had near perfect night vision, giving them the world in grey, and _amlati_ had the inferior version of that, adjusting quickly to low light levels. So, all in all, cutting the lights was a considerably less useful tactic for the Eldritch Society than it might have been, and perhaps even less useful in a restaurant specialising in experimental Nazzadi cuisine, staffed mostly by _homo sapiens nazzadi_, and with a clientèle disproportionately composed of the dark-skinned siblings of humanity.

But surprise still worked.

A huge figure, bat-like wings protruding from its back, with skin the colour of an old bruise, the four eyes on its head glinting green in the low light raised an arm as it ran towards the table where the family sat. A huge, hooked barb, the width of one of its massive fingers, shot out from under its wrist, and took the father through the shoulder, punching through, and nailing him to the chair like a butterfly. He yelled in pain, aware of the three metre figure baring down on him, but unable to move.

"They all deserve to die! They're unclean!" yelled Mantodea, over the mind-link.

A faint buzzing arose from the other side of the room, like some vast insect from the prehistory of the world, from hundreds of millions of years before humanity dared profane the surface of earth. The air temperature dropped, too, as a thick, creeping fog began to flow across the ground, running footsteps emanating from the centre of it. The human waitress whom the father had been arguing with, a middle aged woman of Indian ethnicity, had been replaced by a figure, two and a half metres tall, which bore most resemblance to a flayed corpse; a clawed, flayed corpse, from whose forehead protruded a single eye, moved, and in a single blurred instant, picked up the squalling child and slammed it into the mother's face with a force enough to break bones.

Human bones, that is. The mother, thin and graceful in her movements... turned inside out, a snake-like creature, horned and retaining its arms, replaced the lithe figure, and vomited forth a barrage of needles into the arm of the flayed corpse, the Phantom Tager. They tore through the flesh, behaving more like 9mm railgun rounds than something organic, as they leaked their paralysing venom into the unnatural flesh of the Tager. It roared, in a saurian fashion quite unlike its appearance.

"We've got a Gelgore here, and the child is one too. That should have broken its neck," Deva stated over the mindlink, her mental voice cold, showing none of the pain the symbiont felt. "I think I can hold off the poison, but I'll need help." She emphasised the mind-words by throwing the infant Gelgore, its shape in flux as parts of its body flipped between its two forms into a wall, head first, and following that up with a uppercut to the chest of the beast which spawned it, which dove out the way, only taking a glancing blow which still cracked the scales on its shoulder.

"Ahhhh, Tagersssssssss," the ophidian beast hissed, emphasising its words with another burst of needles from its maw. Deva grabbed it by the throat, and directed the needles into its other child, a set of spikes sinking into the seven year old boy, who fell off the chair, stiffening up as the venom paralysed his muscles.

But the Vampire had arrived now, exceptional in size even by the standards of its kind (quite in opposition to its host), and it clamped its hands around the neck of the father. Livid marks appeared on his throat, as the winged monster crushed his windpipe, and as the skin broke like thin tissue paper, a thin red mist seeped out, the scent of burning blood overpowering the rest of the room.

It was joined by the scent of the grave, as the approaching fog and the thing which generated it enveloped the fight between the Gelgore and the Phantom. A rapid-fire sequence of punches left frost-blooms on the snake-thing's scales.

It was trying to regenerate the damage, but she was not a Zabuth, in His Name. The probable outcome was her death, the creature which was known as Yualy, knew. They normally required a four-to-one advantage to reliably beat the cowardly things which opposed the work of the Children of Chaos.

Luckily, they had that.

Occelus, flying overhead, all of his profusion of senses active, suddenly realised that the majority of the restaurant was not trying to leave due to the powercut. No, what they were doing was getting into what he recognised as advantageous combat positions. Which meant...

"Fuck, it's a trap!" he broadcast. "Most of the restaurant is probably Dhohanoids!" He then twisted his flight, insectoid wings shifting, and dove, fastening the whips which he extended from his forearms around the neck of Unama Bright.

_And let momentum do the rest..._

The head came off. Mantodea turned, and fired another spike from her wrist into the eye of the Gelgore, which went into convulsions on the floor. The Phantom knelt beside it in a flowing manner, sticking both of its wrist blades into the side of its head. Strange, the mist still flowing, dispatched the two children dispassionately, crushing the human's skull, and choking the small reptile with the Gravewind emanating from his body.

"And get out of here!" commanded Deva, as she flicked back to human form, pressing the detonator at the hip of her waitress costume, before flicking back to her Phantom.

The ceiling blew out, destroying the glass and causing it to shatter, and powdering the décor with plaster.. Occelus added to the confusion by secreting a gossamer bomb, letting it fall, where it burst with a blinding light, even more extreme in the darkness. He flew out of the new hole in the roof, wings buzzing, joined by the Vampire, who was carrying the Phantom.

That left Strange, alone in the room full of Dhohanoids. He darted towards a wall, hidden by the fog which he released. He passed cleanly though the reinforced steel-and concrete wall, such a barrier no object for a Spectre.

They left behind one butchered family for the Chrysalis Corporation to clean up. It really wouldn't do for the NEG to find an inhuman taint in such an important family.

~'/|\'~

Shinji inserted his hand into the 'scanner by the door to the apartment complex. The reader pinged up green, inducing a grunt of surprise from the solider by the door.

"Huh. That's unusual," the mechanical voice from under the helmet filters stated.

"What is?" asked Shinji.

"A visitor. For the HVT in here. I've only seen adults. But, hey, your profile checks out. Go on through."

The door slid open, and Shinji passed though. He checked the list of residents by the unmanned reception. There was only one, up on the fourth floor; Room 402, Rei Ayanami. All the other five floors were completely empty.

_So. Why would they put her in a building, on her own. This is a big, fairly high quality apartment complex, in a fairly good part of the arcology, and she's the only resident. Come to think of it, why isn't she in the same block as Misato, say, which has even better security than this place._

And didn't Misato say that any other pilots would be living with her? Curious and curiouser. Well, actually "Curious, and more curious", and even then the sentence doesn't make more sense.

Focus, Shinji! We... I can argue grammatical semantics (stupid English as the official language) later. Now, we just have to go to Rei's room, and give her this card, then I can get out of here. The only way this place could be any more creepy would be if it was all mysteriously decaying and littered with rubbish, instead of being worryingly clinical, slightly dusty and seemingly unlived in.

By this point, his wondering wanderings had led him to room 402. He knocked at the door, a neo-oak design that looked like it was from the '50s, and really did not fit with the white cleanliness of the rest of the building, built in an '80s neopostantimodernism style.

"Excuse me." He paused.

The door swung open, the lock seemingly not engaged.

"It's Shinji. Shinji Ikari?" He paused again. "Ayanami, I'm coming in."

The room beyond the small antechamber was... white. Very white. The walls were bare, the floor uncarpeted, the curtains barely aside, while a single LED illuminated the room in harsh brilliance. And the entire place was a tip. Discarded newsheets, printed from a nanofactory and then discarded, littered the floor. He bent down, and picked one up.

Words had been highlighted, seemingly at random, in red pen, underlinings and and scribbles marring the aged paper. He read the one in his hand.

________________________________________________________________________________  
_  
"TERR__**ORIST [1] **__A__**TTACK ON GENERATOR [2]**__  
__  
NEG [3] __**blam**__es cult [4] activities_

An attack on a power plant in the Industrial District left the _**Arm**__ourcorp Knightsbridge-2 facility without power for over six __**h**__ours [5], causing production of power __**arm**__our to cease. The NEG has condemned the attack, and it has been classified as cult activity[6], putting it under the jurisdiction of the OIS, a declaration __**condoned**__ by __**Arm**__ourcorp scientist, Dr Unama Bright[7], the man responsible for the production of __**hull**__-grade materials at that site. In an __**ex**__clusive [8] interview, he stated that any attacks against such facilities __**fundamental**__ly weakened the NEG war effort, by crippling vital[9] supplies, and so should be prosecuted and condemned w__**i**__th the utmo__**st**__**sever**__ity. "Only an inhuman[10] cultish [11] freak [12]could work against the NEG in this way."_

_**Arm**__ourcorp share prices __**fell**__ [13] slightly at the news, before recovering later, ending down 4.50 points at 1337.25"_

And then there were the annotations, in red ink, which jumped between English and Japanese characters.

[1] What is terror when you don't feel _vrees_? I have a terrible feeling of _anhung_ about this case. What do words mean?

[2] "He who controls the power controls the people. And I control the power." Taym Saleh, PACC Chairman, 2032.

[3] GI?

[4] GI2?

[5] "Thou art a dreaming thing; // a fever of thyself – think of the Earth." - John Keats.

[6] Lies from liars about liars at the prompting of liars. I see the lies; they are unclean.

[7] Words from a dead girls; or a dead man in this case. It is an inevitability that he will be targeted, I know that, but I do not know why?

But I can guess. But guessing is all I can do, the silent one, the wilted lily held in the hands of a pale girl thrown off the Acropolis. Which will rise again, from the waters, but empty of the hierophant and his acolytes. The acolytes throw themselves at an island made out of tin. Tin was linked to Jupiter by the Romans, king of the Gods. And the Purple Caesar is reading this now.

[8] Exclusive? Or inclusive?

[9] These vital supplies only produce death. The Fourth Infant wakes, and he will be of the Environment. The Third Infant is the Senses. The Second Infant is Manipulative. And the First, the Eldest, is so very hard to see. He is shrouded to my Senses. But it is only logical, therefore, that he is somatic. That would please (0, 0, 0, 0, 0) 5 Position Vector, and one mother. Or **Mother**?

4 is 2 to the power of 2.

_She can, though every face will scowl  
And every windy quarter howl  
Or every bellows burst, be happy still._  
William Butler Yeats. These words were not written for me, for I can see the edges of it. They do not terrify me. _Vrees_ reassures me.

[10] Mother? Or **Mother**? Or Mitochondrial DNA?

[11] It tastes like fresh blood, you know. The statement here.

[12] And we'll laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh. That is a statement of a computer from long ago, though, had it been real, the hounds would have been there.

[13] "_Look at my works, ye mighty, and despair! Do you really think I'd explain my masterstroke if there was a slightest chance of you affecting its outcome?"_ - Percy Bysshe Shelley

It will happen. The white who loves will betray the GI because she can and must to save more people than the GI and the oblong would have saved in their attempt to subvert the plans of the foreboding to prevent chaos from crawling its way across the land and a butterfly emerging and flapping its wings. A storm is coming, and the watch ticks down to midnight. The sleeper stirs too late, because he is already in a jail cell and dreams of freedom. The dead one overthrown by his sibling, hail Caesar of Sins who read this, tries to reclaim his authority, but the fool is dead and his name is not his anymore and yet **he knows** when they use it. Red fire, terrible and prideful, will enter my life, my envy and the life of the Caesar of Sins who does not move, clad in purple, but hidden under the clothes of these days, blue and grey in _urbis_, green and brown in the wilds.

I am two. I am what I am, but I am in what I am for I am the thing and the thing which controls the thing that I am. No, I am three. The labelling system is incorrect. There are walls to see beyond, and I can see past more one more wall than most to see what might be to come. Maybe. Inevitably.

//Giggles// In my sleep.

Triskaideka is a good thing, for it best describes this world.

________________________________________________________________________________

Shinji dropped the piece of paper. It floated down, drifting in the air, left and right, before landing to the left of his foot.

_What. The. Fuck. Right. So, she is most probably completely insane. Great._

There is a madwoman in the seat of a 40 metre giant Engel that can take down considerable amounts of the NEG's forces.

And because they monitor all the dwellings of the pilots, they must know about this. And thus consider it an acceptable risk.

Fuck.

So, I'm just going to leave the card here, then esc... Argghh!

Rei was standing immediately behind him as he turned to leave, clad only in a towel draped around her neck and dripping wet.

Shinji screamed.

"How the hell did you get there," he yelled in Japanese, when he was sure that he wasn't going to have a heart attack.

"What are you doing in my room?" Rei asked in the same language, her voice level and quiet as usual, and somehow exceedingly intimidating for that simple face.

"Uh... I... that is, Doctor Akagi told me to give you... that is," he began haltingly, his system flooded with adrenaline, backing away from her, and both trying not to look at her nakedness while still trying to keep an eye on her, to stop her from... going for his throat, or something.

He realised that his path of retreat had led him into her main room. The room was very bright, he realised, which just made the mess worse; the bare walls and floor in their unity of colour profaned by the bloodied bandages and dirty clothing which littered the room. She seemed almost invisible in here, her unclad state blending into the walls as surely as modern stealth systems.

Shinji found himself able to relax slightly, as Rei moved away from the entry way, and began picking clothing off the floor, and putting it on.

"... and, uh, the door was open, so I thought you might not be in... and uh, I thought I'd leave the card," Shinji scrambled around in his pocket, before drawing it out, "here it is, see... uh, yes, I thought I'd leave it here... so I didn't bother you... um." He trailed off. "Um. Yes." He waved the card in the air. "So, here it is."

He decided to clarify, and took a deep breath, as Rei dressed behind him.

"Ritsuko told me that she'd forgotten to give it to you. It's true. But no-one answered when I rang the doorbell at the entry, and the door opened when I knocked on it... Anyway, yes, I had to give it to you before you went to the start-up today, and forgot about it yesterday, because they'd make you go through the whole brain-scan for Assimilation, and all those tests."

There was a click as the door closed as Rei left without a word. Shinji turned, and ran to catch up. He just had to give her the card, and then he could get back to not talking to her, and maybe even return to that state where she was an object of mystery, not of fear.

But some things cannot be unlearned.

~'/|\'~

Test Pilot Asuka Langley Soryu crouched behind field fortifications, clad in Unit 02. Her Evangelion (hers. Not anyone else's.) was painted from its ceremonial red, in the browns and greens of this muddy field in Eastern Europe. Only the red stripes on its face and shoulders showed it as hers. The 120mm High Velocity Penetrator was clutched in her arms, trigger discipline (even in a 40 metre high mech) in full effect.

She ran a diagnostic over her integral weapons.

_**Head:**__  
Twin Linked CB444/AA Charge Beams – Status: Green, running off Evangelion D-Engine  
__**Right Shoulder:**__  
MPACK 4 Missile Pod – Status: Green, 20/20 Missiles remaining.  
__**Left Shoulder:**__  
MPACK 4 Missile Pod – Status: Green, 20/20 Missiles remaining.  
__**Torso:**__  
CNFS Chaff Canister – Status: Green, 10/10 Uses remaining.  
CNFS Chaff Canister – Status: Green, 10/10 Uses remaining.  
__**Right Arm:**__  
Hyperedged Claws – Status: Green, Dimensional Shield Inactive  
Hyperedge Blade – Status: Green, Dimensional Shield Inactive  
Twin Linked HP42 Heavy Plasma Cannons – Status Green, running off Evangelion D-Engine. Molecule feed: Air  
__**Left Arm:**__  
Hyperedged Claws – Status: Green, Dimensional Shield Inactive  
Hyperedge Blade – Status: Green, Dimensional Shield Inactive  
PP1-P (Prototype) High Energy "Flamethrower" - Status: Green, running off Evangelion/internal D-Engine. Molecule feed: Air.  
__**Right Leg:**__  
Hyperedged Claws – Status: Green, Dimensional Shield Inactive  
Hyperedged Spur– Status: Green, Dimensional Shield Inactive  
__**Left Leg:**__  
Hyperedged Claws – Status: Green, Dimensional Shield Inactive  
Hyperedged Spur– Status: Green, Dimensional Shield Inactive_

She smiled, broadly. The Mass Production Evangelions had sorted out the problems with the armaments of the earlier prototypes. She'd seen the damage reports, after Kaji had so sweetly persuaded the NEA that she could have access to the action reports on Unit 01. The idiot Third Child had actually managed to damage the Unit with the Lightning Cannon; it was no surprise that it had been replaced in Unit 02 by a "flamethrower". The name was actually an inaccuracy, because the weapon bore more resemblance to a plasma cannon, with the magnetic confinement used on the projectile removed. When fired, it flooded an arc of thirty degrees with the raw material of stars. The charge beams had been moved to the head, making it easier for the exceedingly heavy weapons to be fired with another weapon in her hands, and their old position filled with twin linked plasma cannons. Sure, they had got rid of the hyperedged horn, to make space for the charge beams, but that wasn't really necessary, honestly.

The Migou were making a broad advance along the Eastern Front, using too many troops for a mere probe. Worse, Command had seen hint on radar and from orbit that the Hive Ship, up in orbit, had deployed multiple Swarm Ships to aid in the attack. Those things were the equal of a Battlecruiser, and it was quite possible that they had deployed more Swarm Ships here than humanity had of their counterparts. They had in the Conquest of Russia, they had in the Fall of Alaska.

All along the battlefront, NEA units began picking up blips on their long range radars. There were a lot more hostile blips than there were human and Nazzadi units to defend. And then the bombardment began. Migou Hailstorms, scuttling on their four biomechanical legs, and Wasps, coming in low and fast with their equivalent to the A-Pod, technology stolen from humanity, opened up with direct fire Null Cannons, which temporarily weakened the strong force, tearing their target apart in a burst of alpha radiation, and indirect salvos of long range rockets. The NEA counterbatteries opened up, their LAIs locating the sources of fire, and opening up with the Jaegar artilery.

The sky filled with the shriek of NEA shells, the hum of the Migou missiles, and the dreadful tearing noise that the Null Cannons, a black core surrounded by a blue-green corona, made. The humans bunkered down, trying to survive the barrage. There was nothing more that they could do.

Up in the skies, Migou Darts, almond shaped craft which tapered to a laser cannon mounted point at one end and a three-finned protrusion at the other, fought F-1 Spitfires. One on one, the Darts were notably inferior, until the Spitfires ran out of missiles, which allowed them to engage from long beyond the range of the mass-produced Migou craft. But it was not one-on-one. The Migou outnumbered the air forces of the NEA four to one, and moreover merely had the goal of delaying the human interceptors from hitting the Migou troopships, and preventing them from running their own air-to-ground missions.

And that they did most admirably.

"Fortification Alpha-Bravo-Zeta, we have lost air superiority over your location, and have no reserves to reclaim your position. Be advised that you will see ground forces within the next five minutes. Hold until ordered to retreat."

Within the entry pod, Asuka shivered in anticipation. The other senses of the Evangelion showed her that there was a massing just over the horizon, just as her HUD picked up the air units it could identify. She set her head-mounted charge beams to autotarget, and watched as the onboard LAI hit craft after craft with relativistic particle beams, swatting the Migou out of the air like the insects that they resembled. Now that the airspace had been declared to be hostile, non-specialised units were permitted to engage, by NEA doctrine.

A floating head appeared on screen. It was Captain Qualy, commander of Alpha Beta Zeta, and the individual with local tactical control.

"Test Pilot Soryu, the Migou are going to hit us soon. Intel reports at least three Behemoth-class mecha, and a horde of smaller ones." She paused, concern showing in her dark face. "Are you holding up all right? Under the barrage?"

"Yes Captain, I am fine," Asuka replied, coldly. "There is no need to hold my hand, or treat me me differently."

The Captain sighed. "No, there never seems to be. Your task is to preserve the integrity of Unit 02."

"Understood, Captain. Test Pilot Soryu," how she hated that rank, a meaninglessness title that only displayed the sophistry they had used to get her onto the front lines, "out."

_She annoys me so much! She assumes just because I'm young, I must be weak. I'm not weak! Hell, I've probably been in training longer than she has. She doesn't look much above 25!_

"Asuka, your synchronisation ratio is good, in the sixties," Control told her, back from the Ashcroft Foundation Institute back in Berlin-2. Gendo Ikari had taken most of the staff with him to London-2, but the Berlin Institute was where Kyoko Zepplin Soryu had done a lot of work on what would become the Evangelion project, and it remained one of the few places in the world capable of running and monitoring an Evangelion.

Asuka smiled. "Thank, Control."

Next to her crouched position in the redoubt, a Hurricane, a Nazzadi mecha classed as a Tactical Reconnaissance Mech, opened fire with the hand-held Charge Beam it was carrying. She dwarfed it; the sniper was just under five metres tall.

The beam lanced out, its path bright as the sun. Just under 100 metres away, a Migou Dragonfly, their stealthed reconnaissance mecha fell to the ground, its core pieced by the high energy beam.

Asuka turned off the autotargeter. She'd need those Charge Beams sooner rather than later, it looked.

And indeed it seems that the destruction of their forwards unit was enough incentive for the Migou to attack.

"They're coming!" was broadcast over TacCom to all pilots. "Looks... looks like six Locusts, four Scorpions, four Wasps... oh god! Two Spiders, two Mantises! We've got four Behemoths coming our way! And a horde of Cockroaches!"

A shudder passed down the spines of all of the officers in the fortification. They only had conventional mecha here, excluding the prototypical Evangelion-class, and both Spiders and Mantises outmassed, outgunned and outarmoured any of the units they had here.

A thud hit the base, followed by a second one, which both shook the ground.

Oh yes. And Mantises could just almost a kilometre in the air, and land safely, firing as they came. Screams began to fill TacCom, filtered out by the LAI Morale Filters, but a harbinger to those who had access to the unfiltered stream.

The Migou pilot of one of the Mantises realised its mistake in jumping into a hot spot without sufficient intelligence, though, when a greenish-brown shape, which on its approach it had taken to be a human building, turned worryingly quickly and hit it with a fully automatic burst of 120mm shells, which at such short range punched straight through its armour, the pyrophoric bolts of depleted uranium (with an iron core) pinning it to the ground. Its legs weakly spasmed, as the biomechanical muscles gave out, before a foot, whose shoe size required scientific notation to record came down, crushing the cockpit under the its mass.

Asuka turned, and opened up with burst fire on the advancing forces, punching into the Migou forces. The Migou design philosophy (which in part had been passed down to the Nazzadi) favoured light armour; the Migou to make the vehicles cheaper, while the Nazzadi for reasons of speed. The Yuggothian fungoids, though, were probably regretting it, as a massively upscaled version of an AP cannon reaped their ranks in the same way that its lesser version did infantry. The twin-linked Charge Beam took its toll, too, as relativistic particles punched through one Scorpion, tearing a line straight through it. That missed any vital components, but it did slow it down enough that it took an HV round in the next sweep.

The rifle clicked empty. Asuka growled in frustration, and ducked back down, only to feel a horrible burning sensation in her back, as the other Mantis opened up its entire arsenal into her from behind.

The second Null Ray shot was blocked by a hastily erected AT field.

_I know you're working for them, she had said. I know you're involved in that group._

What group, the other woman had replied. They're just some friends from academia, and I'm sure _that you've already abused your privileges and checked all their records. And found them clean._

Yes, she had said. Where the security of the Project matters, nothing is abusing my privileges.

The other woman had smirked, in an exceptionally annoying way.

Well, she had replied, that is a well known trait of yours. Just ask your husb... Oh, wait.

And then she had laughed, and walked off.

Bitch.

The Migou within had just enough time to feel their species equivalent of surprise, before Asuka span and slammed the empty rifle into the biomechanical monster again and again, until it broke, whereupon she set upon it with her clawed fists, filled with rage, until the Migou within was a squished mess.

Asuka became aware of Control on the radio.

"Asuka," the German-accented voice had stated. "Get a grip on yourself! And that was a very expensive prototype rifle!"

"I'm sorry for damaging the rifle, Control," she replied, "but that really hurt."

"If you're getting too much mental feedback, Soryu, try dropping your synchronisation ratio. You peaked into the high eighties just then, which means that mental feedback is a real issue."

"Where is it now?" she asked, swatting at the advancing forces with her Charge Beams and Plasma Cannons.

"Sixty, plus-or-minus four percent."

"Acknowledged, Control."

Command's face appeared on the HUD

"Test Pilot Soryu, we're pleased to report that the Migou are pulling back. And congratulations on taking down those two Behemoths; they'd have gutted us from the inside out had we not stopped them, and even if we had, we'd have had pull troops back, which means that we'd likely have been overwhelmed."

Asuka smiled broadly.

"I'm just honoured to serve humanity," she declared in an exceedingly immodest voice. "Do you know why they pulled back?"

"We haven't a clue, Test Pilot. It's just as well that they did, though, because a Swarm Ship was headed our way, and we had firm orders from High Command to pull you out if they got one of those monsters over here."

"Well, that's lucky," Asuka said. "I suppose it was just a test push, anyway."

~'/|\'~

In the London-2 High Command, the Field Marshals were moved from their monitoring of the data feed from the Unit 00 reactivation test by an urgent message from the monitoring specialists.

"What is it?" asked Jameson, as they strode into the room.

"Two things, Field Marshal," answered the man on the terminal. "Firstly, Migou forces are pulling back from their push against the Eastern Front. That'd be good news, Sir, if we hadn't just lost contact with NEAF Norwich."

"You think it's a feint," asked Lehy, stating it, rather than asking.

"Yes, Ma'am. It looks like they have Swarm Ships coming in over the North Sea, moved from their attack on the Eastern Front. Our defences are crippled if Norwich is down."

"Those bastard bugs!" she declared loudly, making a fist and punching her other hand. "Right, we've got to get ready. You're right; we can't stop multiple Swarm Ships before they get to London-2, especially with the _Ashcroft_ back in the Atlantic."

"We have to look to the worst," stated Kora. "Is this mass treachery? Do they have a new form of Assimilation, which we can't detect."

"We've got video from one of the defence outposts around... around Norwich," stammered another officer, her fingers flying over the keyboard. Putting it up on main screen now!"

A black trapezohedron, the colour of the void between galaxies, enormous in dimensions hung over the ruins of the New Earth Government base. Beams of utter darkness, an extension of the fabric that made it up, lashed out from each of its points, hitting anything that moved. A pall of smoke hung over the scene, making the bright day into twilight.

The video cut off.

**SIGNAL LOST**

FACILITY IS NOT RESPONDING

ASSUMED DESTROYED

"It's a pattern blue," stated the comms officer.

~'/|\'~


	7. Chapter 6 Part 1: Hunted in Darkness

**Chapter 6 - Part 1**

Hunters/Hunted in Darkness

~'/|\'~

Things were tense in the NEG High Command.

"Are you sure that it's a Code Blue?" Marshal Lehy asked.

"Certain, Marshal," the technician replied. "Our LAI is certain, we've just got a response back from Ashcroft's MAGI LAI which matches, and this level of spacetime deformation has only been encountered with the previous Heralds."

"We've calculated a velocity vector," called another one of the women at the computers, projecting it up onto the mainscreen. " Direct point-to-point to London-2. It's impossible for it to have been moving like it is before we lost contact with Norwich. They'd have seen it, not to mention the naval assets in the North Sea. It's like it..."

"Just appeared," completed Jameson. He paused. "Well. Fuck." He stared up at the projection, reading off its speed. "It's only moving at 20 kmph; that should mean that it should be in range within... it'll be able to see the top of London-2 from seventy-two kilometres away? Is that right?"

"The target appears to be a black regular tetragonal trapezohedron, of side length 300 metres plus-or-minus 10 percent. That's eight interlocking kite-shaped faces, four on top, four on the bottom," read off an analyst. "It is hovering, without obvious signs of A-Pod assisted technology or more crude methods, 100 metres off the ground at its centre of mass. Well, we don't know that it is its centre of mass; it's where its centre of mass would be if it were a uniform solid. The AT Field on this thing is strong enough that it's scattering light out of the visible spectrum. That's why it's black. We're getting a really bright scatter off it in the mid infra-red, all the way into the far radio."

"Is that disrupting comms in the area?" asked Marshal Kora.

"Yes, sir. We only got the images we did through optical cables; radio is effectively jammed." The analyst paused the video, grimacing slightly as he stared at the Herald. "Look at it. You can actually see the heat shimmer about it, and even from its height the ground around it seems scorched." He took a deep breath, letting it out slowly. "We'd have problems operating a coordinated assault on the thing. The standard comms channels are flooded with the noise that thing is giving out."

Lehy glanced at her comrades.

"What options do we have? We have this Herald... do we have a code-name assigned for it yet?"

"It's been assigned the name "Mot", Marshal," said the analyst, as he folded up his laptop, ready to colonise one of the empty seats and power points in the command centre.

She sighed. "Okay. Who comes up with these... never mind. Assets. We have affirmation that Ashcroft has managed to get the second Evangelion-class Engel operating, yes?"

Jameson nodded. "Correct. That gives us two units which have an observed ability to kill these entities. Can we get the third one, over on the Eastern Front, over in time?"

"No," called one of the technicians. "The Herald will be in sight of London-2 in less than five hours, and the third Evangelion was deployed to fight off the anticipated Migou assault."

"Which brings us to our next problem," interjected Kora. "We have between eight and thirteen Migou Swarm Ships crossing the North Sea, through the new hole we have in our defences. Even if we threw all our assets against them, projections estimate that two to seven would still manage to get within firing range of London-2. Each of those Swarm Ships carries at least 80 conventional units, and over forty mecha, both native Migou and Assimilated. At the low end, that's enough to cause considerable damage, with our forces already weakened by the incursion of Asherah. At the pessimistic end of projections..."

He didn't complete his sentence. He didn't need to. If London-2 fell, the rest of the British Isles, already pressed by Dagonite incursions in Ireland and in the north of Scotland, would be doomed. With the destruction of the capital of the European State, the Migou would be able to open a second front against the rest of Europe, launching raids over the Channel.

Lehy took several deep breaths, head bowed, biting on her index fingers. She swallowed deeply.

"What can we evacuate?"

Jameson stared blankly at the screen, his gaze passing beyond the screen.

"Not enough. It'll be here too fast to evacuate even ten percent of the civilians, and judging how fast we lost contact with Norfolk, that might quite well be.... the end." He slammed his fist into his hand. "Damn it!" he snarled. "If only we knew more about whatever these Heralds are! What do they want?!"

Marshal Jameson started pacing up and down.

"Save our conventional forces," he said slowly, his rage displaced by horrific coolness. "We need to save them for the Migou fleet. If the Migou can hold Britain, after we wasted our troops against the Herald, then they can hit the rest of Europe, instead of battering themselves up against the Eastern Front, then we will have failed. We don't know what the Herald wants; if it wants death, then I will willingly give it London-2 if we can save the rest of Europe."

Lehy glared at him, red eyes filled with a horrified rage.

"There are thirty million people in the Greater London Area and the Arcology. Over half a percent of _the global population_."

"You think I don't know that!" snapped Jameson back, face suddenly haggard. "Of course, it isn't good. It wouldn't have been so had..." he shook his head, forcing himself to be calm.

The unspoken words hung in the air. _It wouldn't have been so had you lot not killed almost two billion in the First Arcanotech War._ Alexander Jameson had been a young mecha pilot in that war. He'd been part of the assault which had killed the Nazzadi Firstborn Reluty. He'd seen the fire that rained down upon London that a certain young Nazzadi officer had retaliated with, pulling the alien forces back together after the decapitation strike.

There was a slightly uncomfortable silence. The youngest of the three, Kora, broke it. Born during the First War, he lacked the memories and prejudices of his peers, and was typical of the new breed that was rising through the ranks; ambitious, resolute, and used to the compromises of the Aeon War. He had been conceived on an Nazzadi invasion ship, and that made all the difference; those of his age and older had none of the false memories that the rest of the subspecies possessed.

"I agree with Jameson," he said, choosing his words carefully. "It's been said; better than the devil you know that the devil you don't. That's wrong. We know that the Migou will be able to do if they break through; the Herald is an unknown." He paused. "It may be that Ashcroft's Evangelions can kill Target "Mot"; they have succeeded against the previous ones, and they now have two. However, we cannot rely upon it." He turned to one of the specialists working on the computers in the room. "Do we have calculations on the weapon displayed by the Target?"

"First order approximations, sir. It's a capital grade weapon, for certain, but... it isn't acting like it should. The beam itself, from the images we have is acting like a relativistic particle beam, but there's also an explosion at the end." The technician cleared her throat. "That is, there's an explosion beyond that which a relativistic particle beam should cause. It's a bit like AM annihilation; there was a burst of exotic particles, but they were the wrong ones for a positron or anti-proton weapon." Diagrams on the holoscreen matched her words, as high energy equations scrolled across the screen.

"It looked like that, from the links we were getting," Kora continued. "Putting it bluntly, from what I just saw, this thing would be able to destroy a Victory-class in a single shot."

There was a a sudden, almost perfect moment of silence, as all three of the Marshals just realised what has been said.

"Perhaps we don't need to save our forces for the Migou," Jameson said slowly. "Perhaps we just need to slow down the Mot until some "friends" can arrive..."

~'/|\'~

"The reactivation of Evangelion Unit 00 was successful, Representative," Ritsuko said to Gendo. "The First Child is holding her synchronisation ratio at a steady 51%. We have had none of the issues with synchronisity that we had in the previous start-up." She paused. "While both Units are technically capable of field deployment, it is my personal consideration that, as it is, the design of the Test Model is woefully inadequate for operations against the Heralds, both from previous experience and from the data we have received from the NEA High Command on Mot."

"What reasons do you have for those opinions, Doctor?" asked Gendo.

_Perhaps you could even call me by my name_, Ritsuko thought, peeved.

"To put it frankly," she replied, letting none of it show on her face, "Zero-Zero is underarmoured, underarmed, and Rei lacks the synchronisation ratio which we have become accustomed to. It was nothing more than a test-bed, originally, and it hasn't been upgraded to keep in line with military developments, unlike Zero-One."

Gendo nodded. "I agree with your conclusions, Doctor. Keep Rei active, ready to provide back-up, but we'll be sending the Third Child out on his own. I'm authorising the deployment of the prototype Evangelion-scale Type-9 charge beam; the HV Penetrator looks to be inadequate for this. Unfortunately, there isn't time to retrofit Zero-One with the MPACK-4s, but on the back... Load the Harlequin Type-1KT Mortar. We will retain control."

Gendo stared straight into her eyes.

"Understand; this Herald must be killed. The Harbinger of Cessation is greatly favoured." His glasses began to slip down off his nose; he pushed them back up with a finger. "It must be done, Ritsuko."

He watched her leave the room, the faintest hint of a smile on her face. Gendo tapped at his wrist-mounted PCPU.

"Phone, Contacts, Berlin-2, Ashcroft Command, High Security. Run,", he said to the device's LAI

~'/|\'~

Shinji Ikari loped along at an easy running gait, his thirty metre strides eating up the distance. Around him the decaying ruins of Greater London, the vegetation reclaiming the all-too-brief domain of humanity. The canyons of steel, concrete and glass were succumbing to the inevitable embrace of entropy, the rain softening the edges and causing flaky bits of building to shatter upon the cratered ground.

It was just as well that Shinji was using one of the modern roads that cut through the urban decay like a scalpel, the existence of old buildings no distraction to its path. The Evangelion exerted a ridiculous ground pressure, and the ruins of Old London were rife with forgotten underground holes, whether basements, ruins of the Underground, or simple subsidence, which the foot of a 40 metre tall humanoid could fall through.

In his arms, he cradled the Type-9 Charge Beam they had given him before he was sent to the surface. It was a long weapon, with no obvious barrel. The body of the weapon, bulky and a little squarish, took up its full length, painted in an urban colour scheme to match Unit 01. The end was strangely rounded and stubby, compared to the rest of the gun.

He checked the map on his HUD, altering his course slightly. It really was remarkable how closely the interior display of the Evangelion resembled a computer game, from the targeting reticle superimposed over the view of the world that he received from the eyes of the war machine, to the ammunition counters on the edge of the viewscreen. The marker on the map that represented him followed the line that linked to the location of "Silo 92FF".

Misato's head, floating seemingly without a body appeared before him.

"Shinji, are you okay?"

"I'm fine, Misato," he replied, frowning as he focussed on taking the right path on the intersection. "Sorry, yes. Yes, I'm fine." He looked towards her. "I'm going to Silo 92FF, yes? What are silos? Do I need to protect a missile?"

"Oh, right," she said, "I forgot how young you are. They were an inter-War thing. Basically, back in the sixties and early seventies, the Migou hadn't invaded yet. There was this big thing in military planning... well, it was before my time, too, but there was this big thing about building fortifications we could protect military units under, even if the Migou resorted to orbital bombardment."

"But they haven't ever done that," pointed out Shinji, as a flight of Werewolf transports passed over his head, each carrying six power-armoured troopers inside and a medium mecha slung under the back.

"They didn't know that at the time. We hadn't even seen a Migou first hand; the only information on them came from the Nazzadi Firstborn, and they used precision bombardment." The floating Misato head rolled its eyes. "Just look around you. But the Migou haven't ever used anything larger than the main guns on a Swarm Ship."

Shinji swallowed hard. "There are Migou incoming, aren't there. There are Swarm Ships. I... I don't want to have to fight them."

Misato forced a laugh. "You've killed the last two Heralds, Shinji. The Migou ships are just machines."

_Yes,_ Shinji thought, acerbically. _Just six hundred metre long machines, covered in guns. Just. And I was forced to fight the first Herald, as my father basically extorted it out of me, and the second one was already injured. The Swarm Ships, by contrast, are crewed by intelligent beings, and come in swarms. The name is a bit of a clue._

But there was no use complaining. It wasn't as if they would do anything. "I... I suppose," he replied, trying to keep the shake out of his voice. "Talk to me about the Silos, more, please," he asked, trying to distract himself.

"Well, Ritsuko can probably explain it better than..." Misato looked away from him. "No, she's busy." She shook her head. "Anyway, yes, they're hollow tubes bored down into the Earth, with a bunker and vehicle hangar at the bottom. The tube has an elevating platform that runs up and down. It's powered by a dual A-Pod/D-Engine combination, entirely internal, so the power can't be cut. The point is that the troops at the bottom can be deployed rapidly, while being safe against anything but a direct hit." Her eyes flicked as she read an invisible diagram to the left of his face. "You'll be concealed down there, safe, before we deploy you, and it's somewhere safe to retreat to."

Shinji felt a little better upon hearing that. His comfort was broken by the angry voices that erupted from offscreen. There was swearing, in Japanese, English, Nazzadi and German, and some of the voices were mixing that.

Misato saw his eyes widen. "It's fine," she said hastily. "Just a little technical issue..."

Ritsuko's head appeared, floating near to Misato's. Her eyes were narrowed, lips pursed, and generally she was displaying signs of extreme annoyance.

"We have a problem with the mission," she said, her voice quite clearly forcefully controlled. "We've just, finally been told by the NEA that the Herald is throwing out wide-band EM radiation in everything with less energy than the mid-infrared. _After_ we sent you out," her voice dripping with sarcasm. "So we can't protect the equipment properly. We'll be able to talk to you; we can punch through the jamming through local transmitters, but we won't be able to hear you when you're near it."

Shinji had a horrified look on his face. "Wait... wait... wait..." He shook his head. "Wait."

"You've said that bit," interjected Misato.

She received a glare in return. "If I can't even talk to you, how are you meant to even... you know, monitor me. What if something goes wrong? How will you know what I'm doing? If something goes wrong?" He turned his head to look at Ritsuko. "I can't... what will happen if whatever happened to Ayanami happens now?"

"It won't happen to you," Ritsuko answered confidently.

"But why not?" There was a pain hint of panic in Shinji's voice.

Back in the control room, Maya stared at her screen.

"The pilot is showing elevated oxygen consumption, his synchronisation is falling, and slightly erratic brain waves. He's starting to panic."

Ritsuko stared back up at Gendo, enthroned in his vantage point above the floor of the control centre, a slightly helpless expression on her face. He nodded back, once.

Shinji was met by his father's face, joining the other floating faces.

"Shinji," Gendo began, his voice cold. "Do you know what will happen if you don't calm yourself down?" He paused, watching his son's face. "Thirty million people will die. And it will be your fault."

The words hit Shinji like bucket of water to the face. Gendo watched impassively, as shock, rage and guilt flashed across Shinji's face in turn.

"The Army can't stop the Herald, and there is a Migou fleet coming in through the hole in the defences that Mot opened. You will follow orders, and you will kill the Herald, or the loss of London-2 will be your fault."

Below him, Lieutenant Aoba scurried over to Ritsuko, handing her a datasheet. He really didn't want to interrupt the Representative.

Shinji blinked hard, several times. If there were tears, they were gone in the warm LCL that surrounded him.

"I... I understand. I won't run away."

Gendo nodded. "Good." His floating head disappeared from the HUD.

"Lieutenant Aoba just came up with a possible solution, that should, at the very least, give a data stream and sound, if not video," Ritsuko added, after a few moments of silence. "The Silo has an optical data stream that won't be affected. If we can set up an ad-hoc network there, you'll still able to be monitored."

Shinji was silent, inclining his head in response.

Misato looked up at the Representative, her face as neutral as she could make it.

"Was that necessary, Representative?"

Gendo stared back.

"Yes."

~'/|\'~

All along the European, a delicate calculus of time, resources and need was being computed. All the mobile reserves were being depleted, pulled out and split. The ones nearer to the breach that the Herald had opened were being scrambled to the defence of London-2, to prevent the Migou from conquering the islands. The ones which could not reach in time were instead being formed into hasty battlegroups. The dreaded contingencies, that a Migou sneak attack could open a Northern Front, were removed from the collection of plans that no-one wanted to use, and put in active status.

In Chicago, capital of the New Earth Government, alerts were sounding to all important government and military figures. The Minister of War, Geniveve Aristide, was almost bodily dragged out of bed by the (female) officers sent to fetch her to an emergency Council of Ministers. Contingency sterilisation plans were approved; the missiles had their D-Engines inserted, and the co-ordinates of London-2 loaded in.

The NEG would not permit the sensitive research nor the population of the arcology to fall into the hands of the space-fungi from Yuggoth. In the case of the former, the Migou had stolen the plans for the D-Engine, and who knew what they could do with the knowledge on the Engel or Evangelion Projects stored in London-2, even with standard destruction protocols enacted. For the latter, the Migou could use the millions of human beings as Blanks, victims of strange biochemical and physical alterations which kept them almost the same person as they had been before. Almost the same, were it not for the fact that they were now completely loyal to the Migou, and capable of hiding it, unlike the changes which sorcery could inflict upon a person. Blanks were a terrible menace; comparatively far worse than the Hybrids of the Esoteric Order of Dagon. Deep One Hybrids could be found by a simple genescan; Blanks required a brainscan, and for the subtle changes to be picked up.

Asuka Langley Soryu lounged in a comfy chair, back at the Beweglichkeit Base. For all the technical sophistication of the Evangelion Project, they still hadn't solved the problem of the discomfort which sitting in one place for extended periods of time; it was a relief to get out of the machine, after almost ten hours in it. They hadn't let her change, though, so she was still in the plug suit. The bulky garment, shaped much like her Evangelion, had been hosed down, but it still smelt faintly of LCL.

Although it was very annoying that they weren't telling her what was going on. She had just given them the first front-lines test of an Evangelion, personally saved an entire fortification from Migou Behemoth-class mechas in a way which would have taken multiple Engels, and they had left her out here in the anteroom, locked out from whatever was going on. And Kaji wasn't even here; he wasn't on base, to be suitable impressed by the exploits of Asuka, heroine of the New Earth Government.

_Oh, well. Might as well get something productive done._

She pulled out her PCPU, setting the screen to "Reflect", looking at the face of the now-blooded warrior that stared back at her.

_It's good. I'm me... no. Wait. What's that!_

She stared furiously at her face. A clump of hairs, right at the front! They weren't hers! They were the hairs of the other girl!

Wincing, she yanked them out, one by one. The clear, wet follicles at their bases glistened at her in the light, mocking her in the way that the other girl corrupted her flesh and made her cease to be.

The door to the room opened. Asuka quickly dropped the hairs, letting them drift to the ground.

"Test Pilot Soryu." A female Nazzadi Brigadier in full combat armour, stood in the door to the anteroom, with pursed lips. "We have a problem. Now, technically, we can't make you do this, as it is outside the boundaries of your contract with the Ashcroft Foundation, and thus the arrangement where we have access to you..." Her voice was soft, and slightly lilting, her Nazzadi accent notable in the phonetic way that she pronounced certain words.

Asuka smirked. "I'll volunteer."

Brigadier Timany, of Task Force: Valkyrie made a small noise of satisfaction in her head. The Test Pilot had proved as predictable as the psychological reports that she had been given suggested.

"Good. What I am about to tell you is Code: Ultraviolet information. You're involved with the Evangelion Project. I'm sure that you know what that means."

Asuka inclined her head. "I do."

"At exactly 1200 hours today, an entity appeared on the East Coast of the British Isles. Its appearance was concurrent with the destruction of a major lynchpin in our defences. Now the Migou have pulled off their assault on the Eastern Front, and all air units, including multiple Swarm Ships, are converging on this hole. The entity was determined to be a Herald, with the appearance of a black trapezohedron of side roughly 300 metres."

"And you wish to move me up to take out the Herald," completed Asuka, her heart swelling.

"No. Task Force: Valkyrie is a heavy assault formation, of brigade scale. With the exception of our power armoured infantry, it consists purely of Engels. And we're hitting a cluster of Swarm Ships before they get out over the North Sea, as they move parallel to our lines."

Asuka frowned. She wasn't going to get a chance to prove her worth against the Heralds today, as well as the conventional (insofar as the term applies to bio-mechanical monstrosities piloted by creatures that defy classification by Terran taxonomy) Migou units.

"Are we going to be assisted by the Navy? I'm pretty sure that a single Swarm Ship outguns even my Unit 02..."

"It does. We checked," interjected the Brigadier. "And we're a direct assault formation. There is no naval assistance. They're busy holding off what they can. To be clichéd," she said, rolling her eyes, "we **are** the reinforcements. We're taking the fight to them, in the air. Ashcroft technicians are fitting your Evangelion-class with extra A-Pods, to allow it to be carried by a super heavy bomber."

The woman smiled broadly, her prominent incisors and red eyes glinting in the light.

"We're going to show the damn bugs what chimpanzees do to them."

~'/|\'~

Toja sat by his sister's bed.

_Bleep_

Crrrshhh

Bleep

He looked around the room. The walls were cold and sterile, the LED panels in the roof giving a uniform light that left almost no shadows in the room. Everything in the room seemed slightly curved; no sharp angles anywhere. It was like this all the way throughout the Aeon War section of the hospital.

_Bleep_

Crrrshhh

Bleep

The patients here were all in comas; most of those were medically induced. The Aeon War Ward was there to ensure that the patients were physically fit, not to deal with the metal issues of Aeon War Syndrome. The visitors here were a disparate bunch. A fatigued woman sat next to the bed of a small boy, reddened eyes staring hopelessly at her son's torso. She was not clutching his hand. There were no hands for the grieving woman to clutch. To the left of him, a man sat slumped in a hospital chair, asleep. His hair was cut, short making the metallic implants affixed to the bottom of his skull and the back of his neck clear to see. He sat over a woman, her hands tied down even in the coma, whose bandaged head stared up at the ceiling.

_Bleep_

Crrrshhh

_Bleep_

Kany had been like this for five weeks. They'd put her in the coma after what she'd done to herself. She'd... Toja choked up at the thought. No brother should have been forced to see that. And it had all been because she'd looked out of the window. She'd stared at it, that thing that had burst through the arcology wall, and then collapsed. He'd managed to drag her back under the table. When that bit of the ceiling came down, it broke her legs. He'd followed them to the hospital, stayed up all night outside the operating theatre, while they pieced her left leg back together from the mulched flesh and shards of bone that comprised it. They'd given up after seeing how bad it was, and simply amputated and replaced it with a vat-grown new one, but said that the rest of the internal damage had to heal on its own.

When she'd woken up, the next day, she'd screamed until her throat was raw. Mad things, about an empty tomb and a walker in white. She'd said the same words over and over again, words he didn't think she knew. "Metis". "Hierophancy". "Trapezohedron."

And then they'd put her in the Aeon War Ward, when the OIS had come in, after she did it.

They'd told him that there was a good chance that she would never recover, that she'd spend the rest of her life in an Ashcroft Clinic. It was lucky that his father worked for the Foundation, or the costs would have been crippling.

There was a bleeping, as the man to his left got a message on his PCPU. Rapidly, he got up and left. Toja didn't even notice him go, sunk in misery as his sister's chest rise and fall, the machines that she was wired up to confirming that she still lived.

_Bleep_

Crrrshhh

Bleep

~'/|\'~

Nine vast bio-organic monstrosities flew through the clouds, disturbing the vapour and leaving a shredded passage in their wake. They most resembled, if their appearance was to be put in terms that one who had not seen Migou designs before could understand, gothic spires, their engines a bilious green glow at the back. The concentric rings of organic blades that protruded from the hull and mounted the heavy laser cannons glistened wetly, in what light got to them and in the emanations of the A-Pods of the other ships. Each of these leviathans were six hundred metres in length, and outmassed the Victory-class by a factor of two.

Around these great behemoths flocked lesser ships. The Spinners, domed saucers that would not have looked out of place in films 140 years ago flew around their progenitor ships like seagulls around an yacht, bearing more of the Migou ground units, while the air was thick with Darts, the fighters running escort around the capital ships. This was just the first wave, the group that would have been hitting the north of the European Front. More were converging on the target location.

The sorcerer-scientists that commanded this fleet were desperately afraid that they were to be too late. Vibrations and buzzings that translated to panic filled the air in the command decks, safely secreted away in the centre of the ship. The catastrophe that came from the current correct stellar convergence threatened their civilisation, the galaxy spanning empire of which the representatives on Yuggoth were but a small mining outpost, taking the vast resources of the Kupiter Belt. The forces to engage in this war were but of the volunteers from fifty light-years around. But things had deteriorated rapidly, from their point of view, since just before the arrival of the Hive Ship in a lunar orbit. An avatar of the Dead God was present on this planet, this planet where the Hierophant of the Old Ones, as the uplifted mammals so inaccurately called them, slept. But the empire was massive, and stagnant, and the hierarchy of sorcerer-scientists responded but slowly, distracted as they were by the discovery of the D-Engine. A thing which the uplifted mammals had developed, and they had not. Those Migou who knew of this held this to be the most dangerous thing about the situation; a younger race, wilfully ignorant of the proper order of the universe, who played around with things that they did not, and would not comprehend.

Eventually, consensus was reached, and a message sent out from the core of the flagship, to the pilots quarters. They would be obliged to contact the pathetic tribal organisation of the monkeys, to at least alert them of the threat. It was likely that they did not even know what came upon them. And the creatures could not even comprehend the nature of the universe properly, forcing them to go through a translator-ape. Such beings were not truly sentient.

A smallish NEG monitoring station picked up a signal from the incoming Migou fleet, broadcasting completely unencrypted. This was anomalous in itself; the Migou did not use detectable communications; even Blank-piloted craft were retrofitted with the fungoid species' communication devices, which used something akin to telepathy to communicate. The message was passed on up, all the way to London-2, even as the Migou fleet got closer.

Kora was the one who chose to watch it. The message had been scanned for the nasty things that the Migou could include in their broadcasting, and come up clean, but they still didn't trust it.

The message was a simple two dimensional video. It was set to play, as Kora looked on. A man, who looked to be of Chinese ethnicity was standing in front of the camera, in an immaculate NEG uniform. The overlay on the image noted the individual to be one Chen Gong, MIA on the border between the remnants of China and the Migou-controlled territories which had once been Russia.

"A Blank. Figures," muttered Kora to himself.

The man swept his hair back with his left hand, and cleared his throat. Those gestures, so unconsciously human, were something that most infiltrators could not do.

"I come here freely on behalf of the species you, incorrectly I might add, call the Migou. They are not monsters. Those savage worshippers of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named are monsters. The horrific cultists that in acts of savage miscegenation interbreed with the degenerate spawn of Dagon and Hydra are monsters. The Migou are not monsters. They do not mean you harm."

Kora ground his teeth. They often sounded so reasonable, so intelligent compared to the other foes of humanity. It was necessary to remember that they were the ones who had kidnapped humans throughout the ages, and used some of their samples to create his parents as a weapon of war, to kill their own kind, unknowing of how they were used.

"The thing that approaches the city of London-2, however, is most certainly a monster. Understand this. The Migou only came to Earth in the numbers that they did, only created the Nazzadi to save us from ourselves. The fields that we have explored, are exploring and will explore are too dangerous to look into. The D-Engine itself tears a whole into reality, and drains the Orgone, the _ruach_ of the universe itself. We can perform sorcery, although not with the skills that they can, but the emergence of parapsychics threaten our entire species. Too many extra dimensional and other monsters, from when they were forced to occupy the planet the last time, remain for it to be safe for us.

They repeat the offer they made to your governments over and over again. If we but ceased our meddling in things that damage the very fabric of reality by what we do, the Migou will be kind. They understand enlightened self-interest. They are disappointed by how the Nazzadi turned on them, but they will offer them amnesty, too. All we need to do is give up and be accepted into their empire. They are good; they are the first-among-equals of the species under their banner. They will kill the cultists that threaten us, remove the degenerate followers of the Old Ones from our planet, and deal with their servitor races. All we need to do is obey."

This was the standard propaganda of the Migou. For all they talked of a greater good and first among equals, they could not be trusted in anything that they told you that could not be empirically confirmed from multiple independent sources.

"And one of these great threats that they would protect us from is Daoloth, who even now approaches our great city of London-2. The Migou will kill it for you, remove it from Earth. It will save thirty million of us. Do not let people die, due to your pride and the refusal of your government to accept that they are wrong. The Migou only intend to kill this being, and they are capable of doing so. After they have done so, they will quite willingly welcome you into their empire, and give you access to their technology to replace the crude and damaging ones that we have invented on our own.

However, if you are to continue to refuse, they will be forced to press the offensive. Before that, though, they will not attack us except in self-defence. The whole invasion is to protect life itself, from the depredations that certain beings could inflict upon it. They do not wish to take more life than that which they must."

Kora pulled out an empty data-sheet, and snapped it in half, slamming it against the table as hard as he could. It made him feel somewhat better, his red eyes glinting with anger at the words that their tool parroted.

_How can they lie like that?_

The man in the video bowed.

"Remember. They mean us no harm. Please," and Kora could see actual tears in his eyes, "make the right choice."

Kora left the safe booth, and put himself through an immediate brain scan, to check for any alterations. The scan detected a slight agitation, but no other changes. The other two Field Marshals were waiting for him outside the medical ward.

He summarised the offer to them, with the occasional interjection of swearing in Nazzadi. The other two had read the transcript by this point, and Lehy, who had herself been made in a vat in Yuggoth, displayed similar degrees of agitation. Jameson, however, remained calm, and was the one to ask the question.

"Do you think that was genuine? I suspect, at the least, the Herald worries them. Enough that they would prefer to destroy it that us; their force deployments seem to confirm that. They'll probably not _divert forces_," he said, emphasising the last two words, "to attack us while the Herald remains, although they almost certainly will attack anything that looks like threatening them."

"That's what I think, too," replied Lehy, eyes aflame, "because that's good. We certainly have no intention of not attacking them. But if they want to attack Mot, then they're more than welcome to."

~'/|\'~

Mot, the Fifth Herald, and called by the Migou, Daoloth, held its bulk off the ground. The perfect sacred geometry mocked the weak beings of this world, by stooping to their pathetic attempts to understand the universe, and proclaimed its allegiance. Mot had given itself fully to the Crawling Chaos alone out of the Outer Gods, and thus proudly wore its shape. The perfect blackness, letting no visible light radiate from its majesty, was the resplendence of the incarnation of entropy. The death and noise that it bought was a veritable prayer.

On the ground, one hundred metres beneath its mass, it scorched and burned the ground, as it gave out infrared electromagnetic radiation, even as it flooded the lower spectrum with the words of its prayer. The lower beasts, all of them, would not understand it. It did not matter. It must be done.

Through the cloud layer, the first wave of the Migou fleet dropped, the sheer mass of their forces tearing holes in the clouds, through which the mid-day sun could shine. The first of their number vomited forth a small sun, radiant in its burning whiteness, as it discharged its ventral plasma cannon into the Herald.

Which promptly slammed into the shining mesh that the Herald projected from in front of it. The guard of Yog Sothoth, which the humans so feebly called an AT Field was proof against such weakness. Mot was not those foolish beings which had already fallen to a species which lacked any patronage.

Its edges glowed a brilliant white, focussing onto the nearest vertex to that box of flesh and metal that had profaned its brilliance. From such light came darknesses. Impossibly, a beam that appeared to be of the raw void tore out of the black trapezohedron, its passage through the air marked by a horrific shrieking, and bore down upon the Migou ship.

The beam punched straight through the Swarm Ship, neatly punching through its core. The airborne behemoth, larger than the Herald, faltered and fell, its heart torn out. The six hundred metre ship slammed into the ground, buckling and twisting, its hollowed carcass a useless shell.

One dead. Eight remaining. The rest of the Migou fleet recovered from the shock of the death of a capital ship near instantly, pressing the attack. New suns were born over the barren wasteland that Mot left in its wake, while the twin Null Cannons that each Swarm Ship mounted lanced out. Against such firepower, even the blessed shield that the Herald could call upon weakened, holes poked into its impossible black carapace, marring its geometric perfection. It did not stay its wrath, as more of the stygian beams that it projected lanced out, sweeping through the air in precise arcs which cleansed the Darts, mere annoyances to the Herald, but their destruction was the will of the Outer Gods, and it was their instrument.

Naturally, it was at this point that the NEG decided to open fire with their artillery. Salvos of long range missiles, fired from Heterodyne missile vehicles, joined the shrieking shells of the Jaeger self-propelled guns. The fire was split between the conventional foe, the Migou, and the extra-dimensional threat that had appeared in their country. The human forces had been dosed with the RALCL serum which had proved to be so effective in the previous attack, upon the Fourth Herald. It had been deemed that the negligible side effects noted in the analysis of the test group was worth the protection that it gave against Aeon War Syndrome, and that wager appeared to be paying off. A massed barrage of long range missiles slammed nearly simultaneously into one of the Swarm Ships, fire rippling over the hull as the missiles tore slight gashes out over the thick armour. One slammed into a pair of twinned laser cannons, detonating the D-Capacitors which tore apart the cannon, as the Riemann curvature tensor reasserted itself in the warped domain of the cell.

~'/|\'~

_**It comes, incarnate in the void it bears,  
A false robe of Euclid is what it wears,  
Loathsome new stars shall be born on the day,  
That the slothful lord of Rome in its way,  
Shall make a new sun. He will but fail then,  
Death's midwife shall be the strange white maiden.**_

Abdul Alhazred, in the dread tome known as the Necronomicon.

_**This verse is conventionally held,in most translations, to be one of the signs that the stars are right. Certainly, the idea that new stars shall be created has been held ever since it was written to be a clear sign of the interference of the Gods in the realm of man, for the power to create a sun is far beyond that which man can ever achieve. This particular verse also contains mention of the entity known as the "Slothful Lord of Rome". I personally believe it to be the dread soul of the Outer Gods himself, for the depravity of that city in its final days makes it obvious to the impartial observer that Loathsome Nyarlothotep, the Crawling Chaos himself, corrupted the city from the its former glory, as it imposed culture on the world, overthrowing those barbaric races that existed prior to Rome.**_

Jeremy De'Eath, "Commentaries on the Necronomicon", First Edition, 1921

_**It's the nukes, man! They're going to doom us all. They're going to wake up things that really shouldn't be woken up. Goddammit, you fascist pig! You're oppressing up all, making us serve your vile gods! I know you're a member of one of those goddamn cults. People gotta know the truth, man. They gotta know, to stop your conspiracy from dooming us all. I've seen the foreboding tides of the future.**_

Look out for the motherfucking pale chick! She'll kill us all! She works for the Crawling Chaos! They all do! You all do.

_**Not your wife, though, you pig-judge. Turns out she liked the free spirit, if you know what I mean. All night long.**_

### The accused was then silenced, by order of the judge. ###

Court transcript of the trial of one Kenneth Williamson, in 1963, for attempted sabotage of American nuclear launch facilities. Williamson was found to be in compos mentis, and thus was sent to Massachusetts State Penitentary. Williamson was stabbed by another convict one month later, during the middle of the night. The suspect was never caught. The judge in his case later filed for divorce, citing marital infidelity.

_**Twinkly Star, twinkly star.  
Very far, very far.  
Because eight kites rock and eight kites roll,  
And I'm going to fuck all of your souls,  
Cause I'm a star, man, a starman, a nuke in the bed,  
And pale-looking chicks like to give me head.  
Screw all your robots, they're actually men,  
What will be soon, was once long ago then.**_

Black Star Shine (2031), by "Klock Maker". A classic example of Lullaby Post-Metal, a popular genre in some youth subcultures in the early 2030s. The band's label was Lyricun Incorporated, a subsidiary company of Chrysalis.

~'/|\'~

Into this chaos, Shinji emerged from the Silo. He immediately threw himself on his face, which produced a noticeable impact, rolling into cover over a few crumbling, old buildings and behind a few more solid ones. The scene was one that would have given an ancient prophet raw madness, as horrors beyond the comprehension of ancient times bloomed and blossomed in fire. Shinji pulled the Charge Rifle they had given him off his back, and flicked it on, the rifle thrumming as it cooled down the barrel, ready to spill forth its beam of relativistic particles.

He raised his head over the building. Two Swarm Ships were already down, gutted by the incredible firepower of the Herald, and the ground was rife with the carcasses of the lesser Migou ships, shards of warped metal, the unnatural flesh burnt away, like a hail of liquid metal.

_Good,_ thought Shinji, _... but it is horrifying. All that death, even if it is of alien fungus that wants to kill us all._

And that could be me, too.

This building is nothing near enough to protect me. But, nothing is around here.

His comms link to HQ flickered. They were trying to talk to him, but the battlefield was flooded with jamming, both from the Migou, who for some reason seemed to expect human forces to attack them when they were trying to kill Mot, and from the Herald itself. He'd lost contact even before he emerged from the Silo.

Back in the London Geocity, the display showing the readout from Unit 01 flickered and jumped. They were getting data in 5 second bursts, then about three seconds of silence. On the jumping image from Zero-One's viewpoint, they saw the corpses of the Migou ships upon the ground. Unit 01 bounded up from its cover, getting behind one of the crashed behemoths ripped from head to tail, even as another leviathan was gutted by the weapons of the Herald, plummeting to Earth.

"He won't be able to do anything against it," said Ritsuko, her face white. "That monster is taking multiple shots from capital grade weapons. It's having to focus its AT-Field in one direction to stop shots, but the ones that it misses, and the ones that punch through the Imposed Hamiltonian Phase Space are just scratching the body. It's like trying to kill a man in armour with a sharpened fork."

"We have to pull him back," stated Misato. "If he can't hurt it, then it's useless throwing Unit 01 away. One of those Swarm Ships could kill him, even with the Herald gone." She paused, waiting.

The room remained full of the babble of the technical staff, but the one voice that mattered remained silent. Gendo Ikari stared up at the screen, fingers arched and eyes unreadable.

"Representative?" said the Director of Operations, her voice terse.

Up on the screen, the inconsistent data stream show Shinji straighten up from behind his cover. The LAI firing guide converged the variables for him, the target reticle rapidly calculating the adjustments for the spin of the Earth, its magnetic field and the changes in the Weyl and Ricci tensors induced by the presence of dimensional technology.

Shinji fired. The hydrogen "shell" within the weapon was split, electrons torn from protons as the weapon polarised. The electrons were accelerated forwards, towards a positive charge at the end of the barrel, tearing through the atmosphere, ionising the air and creating a temporary area of low pressure as the high energy electrons imparted their momentum to the air, randomising their velocity. The polarity of the barrel then inverted, sending the protons in a quixotic chase for their partners. The stream, curving slightly, slammed into the black fabric of the shining trapezohedron. All this took place in a time period so short that it made a second seem like an age of mankind.

This fearsome force, this pinnacle of the union of human science, of conventional physics and the incredible energy densities provided by the arcane, chipped the Herald. Chipped it like a knife into a hardwood table.

Shinji ducked back on, waiting for the ten second cooling cycle as the rifle dumped the excessive heat that had left it glowing red hot and its internal D-Cells recharged from his main reactors.

_Come on, come on._

He didn't have time for a second shot. Another impossible beam, a minuscule flash of light the precursor to the loathsome darkness of the lance stabbed out of the nearest corner of the Herald. It tore through the Swarm Ship, the armour that could withstand barrage after barrage of conventional arms now pierced twice in quick succession by the gift of the Outer Gods that Mot bore.

Shinji screamed, and Unit 01 screamed with him, the armour melting and burning into the unnatural flesh of the Evangelion even as the horrific beam tore through his lower gut and out the other side. The Evangelion screamed, the scream of a dying god even as it pawed and clawed at its armour, trying to tear off the sheets of ceramic that went far beyond the white-hot, so hot that they were invisible. Shinji, racked by pain, let his human instincts control him, diving sideways along the corpse of the Swarm Ship, just trying to get away and make the pain stop. The lance of death still tracked him, copying his movements perfectly. The torn, broken screams made their way to the control room, where activity ceased, the men and women shocked by the agony in the voice.

Yet perhaps it helped, the beam attenuated by its passage through the hull of the Migou vessel. A twin of twin of Null Cannon shots ripped into the unprotected side of the Herald, punching through its black outer layer, and letting strange ropey filaments, fractal intestines that seemed oddly furred by the budding growths that duplicated themselves, passing through impossible angles and each other with the joyful whims of a mad painter. The Herald ceased its beam in Shinji and turned its weapon on the fungii from Yuggoth, a glancing blow disembowelling another of the Swarm Ships. The Migou focussed on that new wound, the aerial vehicles whittling down the beast like children with knives against a boxer.

Back in the control room, Gendo stood up, even as crackling screams filled the air.

"Fire the 5-KT Mortar," he ordered, his voice steady even as he raised it over the sound of his son.

"Acknowledged," stated Ritsuko. "Rho-sigma-alpha-5-10-93-53-beta-21. Authorisation: Ritsuko Akagi,"

"Authorisation: Gendo Ikari," completed the Representaive.

Misato turned to stare at her friend, then at Gendo.

"You fitted Unit 01 with one of those?!" she said, her voice shocked.

Attached to the back of Unit 01, a railgun swivelled and turned, its gyroscopic mount unaffected by the damage to the front or Zero-One's attempts to pull off the molten metal. It hummed, as it lobbed its shell into the air, in a high trajectory. A result of attempts to provide more subtle technology for launching ICBMs, the original project had been a failure due to questionable decisions for a launch vehicle and the energy requirements for trans-continental weapons.

It had, however, proved admirable for the battlefield delivery of tactical nuclear munitions. And for an Evangelion, the definition of "tactical" was a little broader than it might have been for an unarmoured infantryman.

The five-kilotonne clean fusion device detonated in an airbust over the Herald, and a new sun was born over the skies of England, the radiant light of a star washing down on the marred darkness of the Herald Mot and into the bio-mechanical cathedrals of the Migou, tossing their smaller craft out of the sky like child's toys.

And there was a great noise.

And after that, a great silence.

~'/|\'~


	8. Chapter 6 Part 2: Rei 02

**Chapter 6 - Part 2**

Rei 02  


~'/|\'~

"The jamming's stopped!" called Aoba from his control console.

Misato turned her gaze, silently fuming, to the main display. "How is Unit 01? Do we have any signals from it? _Is Shinji still alive?_"

Maya ran her hands over her keyboard. "Zero-One's onboard communication's equipment should be rebooting in... 3, 2, 1... we have contact back. We have life signals..." there was a collective sigh of relief, "... except the Third Child appears to be unconscious. The Evangelion is in a very, very bad state."

A profile of Unit 01 appeared on the screen. The entire front was a blur of red warning lights, warning of internal damage, breeched hull, and warped servos.

"The armour at the front is completely melted," stated Fuyutsuki, staring at the figure. "The control servos are completely melted. The organic muscles remain, and that'll be the only way to move it."

Gendo adjusted his glasses, which had begun their inexorable, inevitable descent down the bridge of his nose. "Does the pilot remain synchronised, even when unconscious?"

Misato turned to stare at the wall. _How could he? He just sent his son out to fight some extradimensional entity for the third time, just fired a nuclear weapon he'd attached to the Evangelion while Shinji was within the blast radius, and he wouldn't even call him by name!_

Misato realised then that it was even more than that. She was beginning to care for Shinji.

While Misato looked away, Maya replied, "Yes, he remains synchronised, despite the lack of consciousness. Do you want to eject the entry plug?"

Gendo shook his head, a single jerking motion to the left.

"Keep him in there. Sedate him; try to keep him calm,but lucid. We have to keep the Evangelion content, and if the synchronisation wasn't broken by unconsciousness...

_Which it should have been,_ thought Ritsuko. _All the projections indicated that the pilot had to make an effect to keep connected to the EFCS. We tested it on the Second Child. But now there's two anomalies; Rei's asymmetric synchronicity, and the EFCS Type-1 remaining linked._

What is going on? Only Unit 02 seems to completely reliable, with nothing more than the expected side effects. The Fourth should really be a Type-2, along with the political benefits that kind enables.

"... then it remains active. We cannot eject the D-Engines, as we need to retrieve it, the restraining armour is damaged so we cannot lock it down, and thus we cannot control it in the case of rampancy."

Ritsuko turned her gaze from the Representative. "More importantly, what's the status on the rest of the battlefield?"

"We're getting a feed from NEA Headquarters," replied Aoba. "The Migou fleet is destroyed. The... the Herald is still alive, although motionless. It seems to have dug itself into the ground, point first, and there's a massive AT-Field over Mot. The phase shifts and the warping of the Riemann tensors are clearly visible." He turned to stare at the Representative, flicking his gaze to Ritsuko. "It appears, as a hypothesis, to be repairing itself."

"The Migou were really beginning to damage it," said the blond haired woman out loud, seemingly to herself. "They'd managed to neutralise the phase differences by brute force. And Asherah changed after we hit it with a Clover burst, adapted to the new situation." She sighed, in a deep shuddering breath. "We won't be able to hit it now. Look at that Riemann tensor. It would take the combined NEN fleet to take that down."

What was not being mentioned by anyone in the room was the price that the Migou would extract for this use of nuclear weapons. The invaders had made it very clear, through private channels to the NEG, that any use of nuclear weapons would see a retaliation. The nukes used against Asherah had seen the deliberate defoliation of one percent of the Amazon, the Migou salting the ground to prevent anything growing there again. This would be worse. Perhaps they would use some engineered virus against an arcology, to make it into a charnel house if the infection was not caught. Perhaps they would introduce some alien lifeform into the Terran ecology, to throw it out of balance. The specifics did not matter. What mattered is that the Migou would contact them again, and blame them for the necessity of their actions. These messages would also be incorporated into their propaganda, making it more devastating because it was, in a sense, true.

"Will it remain like that?" asked Fuyutsuki.

"Purely as a hypothesis, I'd say no," she replied, after a moment's thought. "It's not moving now, so at least it's been slowed down. I'm fairly sure... that is, I really, really hope that it can't use that beam weapon in this state, either. Although that's actually a misnomer. The data we collected from the broadcasts suggests that it's actually an extended barb of the AT-Field, using the local control of spacetime and the fundamental constants that it grants to make such an impossible weapon."

"So it is safe to approach the Herald?"

Ritsuko nodded. Fuyutsuki cocked his head slightly at Gendo.

"Deploy Rei," ordered Gendo Ikari. "She is to retrieve Unit 01 for repairs."

Misato turned back to the rest of the room. "We won't be able to use the Evangelion in its current state," she said, a slight undercurrent of hostility in her voice. "Almost all the onboard weapons are fried from that, and the DF blades seem to have been activated by the blast. They'll need to be replaced, too. How long will we have to repair Zero-One and work out a way to kill the Herald?"

"We don't know," said Ritsuko, scanning her eyes over the MAGI's interpretation of the feed from the NEA spy drone. "Less than twelve hours, certainly. Maybe even less, if the smaller ships break the NEN cordon, or TF:V fails to stop that second fleet."

"So, Director of Operations, it would be best if you started thinking," added Gendo.

~'/|\'~

Rei ran along the road, following the footprints which the mass of Unit 01 had previously imprinted into the hardened surface.

Her objective was to recover Unit 01 and Pilot Ikari. She would perform that task, because she had been instructed to.

Her pupils contacted, shrinking to tiny black dots in her pale grey irises.

_There are not active threats in the target zone. I can proceed with less caution than was suggested in the mission parameters. Pilot Ikari will be found behind one of the Swarm Ships._

She turned a corner, and then saw what she already knew. A blasted heath choked with smoke, fires coruscating over anything that could burn. The five kilotonne explosion had torn a five and a half kilometre wound in the remains of Old London, the edges of that once-great metropolis protruding all the way out. In the midst of the shattered buildings, levelled by the bomb, lay the carcasses of nine great beasts. Many of the Migou vessels had been slain by the human weapon, the unexpected attack knocking their ships aside with no respect for their noble goal or their wishes. One had ploughed nose first into the ground, its mass penetrating the urban layer and thus it stood as an impromptu tombstone for its kindred. Other Swarm Ships had been picked off by Herald in the aftermath, the unnatural being recovering far faster than the Yuggothians, who were still restricted by the nature of flesh, alien through it may be. Around the deceased leviathans lay the smaller corpses, infants to them, of the other Migou vehicles. Slagged, melted wrecks whose nature could only be guessed at, so great was the damage inflicted upon them.

Above this wreckage, matching the ash that covered the land, the skies were overcast. The clouds had returned, bringing with them a polluted rain, stained black with the debris thrown into the atmosphere. It fell down onto Rei, painting the orange armour of her Evangelion with layers of charcoal dirt. Her onboard Geiger counter flared up; she ignored it. These levels, though potentially hazardous to an infantryman, bore no threat to her body, ensconced as it was within the protective womb of Unit 00. Pilot Ikari would be fine too, she thought, because if the entry plug had been breached, he would already be dead. And if he was alive, there was no need to compromise the mission with undue haste, which might draw the attention of Mot.

Over the Herald, however, the skies remained clear, the clouds around it swirling like in the eye of a hurricane. The reason for this devastation stood, bottom embedded in the ground, enveloped in a thick, twisting web of shining white strands. These cast a strange light over the ashen wasteland that surrounded it, a harsh, white glow that reduced everything to black and white, draining the colour from the world and drawing it into the body of the great beast.

Rei stared at the Herald. Under the mesh of its AT Field, she could see that it was changing. It had been injured, she knew, and injured badly. Had the Migou been permitted to continue, they would more than likely have killed it.

Rei did not question the Representative's decision to use a nuclear weapon against the Herald. He had his reasons, and she did not doubt them.

But now Mot knew about that trick of the apes, impressive though it was. And it would not permit another such blow. It would heal from its wounds; both the Migou lances that had torn into it and the horrific scarring that had melted the entire side facing the blast, warping it and twisting the once-perfect geometry. And it would not be as foolish as to deny the evident wish of its master and lord, the Beast Nyarlothotep. It had been foolish to impose such anathematical order in this incarnation, it realised. No, it would let the perfect progressions of fractals determine its healing, and give itself to the whim of its master in shaping it. And it would not let such object, so small yet bearing destruction from the unity of its components, near it again, it thought, as new shapes budded from the edge of its wounds, similar to their parent body in shape, but each subtly flawed, even as they budded forth their own, even smaller, shapes.

It didn't matter, though. Rei knew where Pilot Ikari was, and she knew that the Entry Plug was not compromised. She would have know had something happened to the pilot or the EFCS. And that left her able to complete her mission. With her white hair waving in the LCL that surrounded and embraced her, like that of Ophelia as she floated down the river, Rei headed down into the centre of this hell.

_Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate_, she thought.

~'/|\'~

Major Misato Katsuragi, Director of Operations for the Evangelion Project, was planning. She had commandeered one of the main Ashcroft Foundation meeting rooms, mainly for the fact that the entire table was the newest projection suite, of the same quality as the Operations Room, allowing her to access everything she could in there, along with the fact that this room had proper food delivery. And so she stood there with a sandwich in her hand, the bread filled with nanofactory-produced tuna. The genuine stuff was exceedingly rare; the fact that the seas were owned by fishmen who tended to to view fishing boats as "fresh breeding stock" made it rather hard to obtain.

Some would have viewed that as frippery and distraction. The Major knew that she didn't want anyone fainting or suffering from low blood sugar. The human body activated its primitive adrenaline response, even when it was not necessary, and this operation had left her on edge.

She stared at the projections containing all the information about the Herald and its predecessors that they had. She could feel a nagging headache coming on, from having to wrap her mind around the concepts that this entailed. This would probably take a few counselling sessions to deal with. She was still having the occasional nightmare about the Kathirat, joining the horrors of New Kuala Lumpur and of Tibet. The Major took another bite of the tuna sandwich, cheeks chewing frantically as she tried to make sense of these counter-intuitive impossibilities.

She glanced over the table at Ritsuko. She was frantically typing away, mixing it with voice inputs in her attempts to get the MAGI to properly model this particular AT-Field.

"Let's review the evidence," she commanded. "Lieutenant Makota, run through the collected data."

The Nazzadi technician adjusted his glasses, the AR flows converging then increasing their flow rate, and cleared his throat. "The target, classified as a Herald and designated "Mot" by the New Earth Army has proved to be the most dangerous of the encountered Heralds so far. When it appeared, it destroyed the Norwich base, opening a hole in our defences and permitting the Migou to break through our..."

The Major raised her hand. "I was actually talking about the tactical and technological data. We need to find a way to kill it."

Makota blushed, the red bringing a hint of colour to his blackish-grey face. "I'm... I'm sorry, Major Katsuragi." He cleared his throat again. "The Herald is armed with a weapon which defies conventional physics and current arcane engineering. It is notably more powerful than the main weapon on a Victory-class battlecruiser." An image appeared of from the onboard cameras of Unit 01, showing the night-black beam lancing straight through a Migou Swarm Ship. "It also appears to be able to project multiple lesser beams at once, with high precision, tracking and accuracy. They emerge from the points where three or more of its faces meet. As a tetragonal trapezohedron, that gives it ten possible projection points. However, at most, seven can face one target at any one time." The imaged changed to show Mot using its beams to swat the smaller Migou ships from the air.

Makota coughed twice, and took a sip of water. "It appears that the source of the energy for the beams all comes from a single internal source. The output of these lesser beams matches that of a BI-class charge beam; still dangerous, but notably less so than its main weapon. It possesses an increased refire rate on those lesser projections, though. For 12.9 seconds after it destroyed that Swarm ship, it did not manifest any beams. It was switching between targets every 0.8 seconds in the lesser mode. Moreover, it compromises its main AT Field to use the main weapons; the points when it was damaged match up with the points which it was firing."

The Major swallowed her mouthful of sandwich, and a strange expression occupied her face.

"I see..." she said, tilting her head slightly. "Analysis?"

"According to the data we've collected to far," began Makota, as the Major took another mouthful of sandwich, chewing intently, "it is presumed that the Herald automatically attacks any target within a certain range, or anything which attempts to harm it. Note the way that it ignored Unit 01 until the Pilot opened fire on it with a charge beam. It appears to prioritise based on threat, too. It switched fire from Unit 01 to the Swarm Ship, when the latter damaged it."

Makota glanced from the display at the Major. She was reading it too. Misato Katsuragi seemed like a bit of a joke most of the time. It had been rumoured that she had been given this position because the NEA wanted someone who, despite having all those medals from the Fall of New Kuala Lumpur, lacked a real grasp of strategy, in a project that had been largely viewed as a waste of money, an obsolete predecessor to the Engels. It had been like choosing to invest in increasing efficiency of oil production in 2033. But this new Misato was strange. Not quite her.

He concluded. "Close range combat with an Evangelion is too risky."

The Major frowned and swallowed. "What about its AT Field?"

"Still active." He pulled up the images that Unit 00 had collected in its recovery of the crippled Unit 01. "It's so strong that you can even see the phase-shifted space, the barrier between its universe and ours."

"What?!" snapped the Major. "Its universe?"

Ritsuko looked up over the table at her friend. "It's not quite true, but it's a useful way of modelling it." She glanced at the Nazzadi. "Makota is a bit too much of a theoretician to explain it properly," she said, smiling slightly. "Basically, within the domain of an AT-Field, the physical constants are anything but that." Ritsuko paused for dramatic effect. It didn't seem to be doing anything to impress the black-haired woman. "Basically, the Herald can do whatever it likes, while it can maintain the interface layer between the area under the AT-Field and the rest of reality. That's why its weapon is so dangerous, the MAGI have finally calculated. Within the beam, the colour force is weaker than the electroweak force. Matter is unstable under those conditions, hence it rips apart. Armour means nothing, unless you're applying principles from outside the World of Elements to hold it together."

The Major frowned. "But in that case, how was Unit 01 able to survive? It took less damage than a Swarm Ship, for goodness sake."

"Because Unit 01 has its own AT-Field, remember," chided Ritsuko. "That's why they can do the things they can do, why they can kill the Heralds. Shinji wasn't focussing on it, so it wasn't active at anything less than a background level, and he has access to less power, anyway."

"So what's it doing now?" She was looking at the most recent images, at the strange protrusions that budded from all of its faces, producing its own offspring.

"At the moment? It's enforcing a strongly non-Euclidean local Lobacheveskian geometry to permit it to have an infinite fractal volume."

Misato blinked. "What?"

Ritsuko sucked in air between her clenched teeth. "It's complicated." She paused. "An easy example. In normal, which is to say Euclidean geometry, the sum of the angles in a triangle always equals pi radians. In Lobacheveskian geometry, pi radians minus the sum of the angles equals a constant." She commanded the LAI to bring up the "explanation image", that of "Circle Limit IV" by MC Escher.

"Here we are. This piece of art is ancient, but it's still really useful," she said, gazing up at the black and white image. "In non-Euclidean geometry, all of these angels and devils are the same size. If you stood in that geometry at any point, it would appear to be the same to you no matter exactly where you were."

A voice interrupted on loudspeakers. "Sorry to disturb you, but we've recovered Unit 01. It's being transported down to the maintenance facilities as I speak."

Misato looked away. "How... how is Shinji?"

"We're keeping him placid with drugs administered to the LCL, until we can get the armour repairs done. There are low level first-degree sympathetic burns as a consequence of N/Phys feedback."

Misato stared up at the ceiling, then the Major turned back to the main computer. "Once the Emergency Constriction Armour is fitted, get him out to the medical facility. I need the best arcanotherapists we have to see to him, to get him back on his feet as fast as we can. You have three hours. If he isn't fixed by then, dope him up with smart painkillers and get ready to get him back in the Evangelion." She paused, and turned to look at Ritsuko. "What is the exact condition of Unit 01? What can it do in its current state?"

Doctor Akagi picked up a cup of coffee. "The chest plate and the third defence armour were completely slagged. It's fortunate that the central control unit remained intact."

"Another three or so seconds and it would have completely overcome the residual AT-Field," added Maya.

The older woman nodded. "We're fitting the emergency control armour, but that just serves as a restraint. It won't provide anything like the protection of the proper armour. It's not designed to be deployed in this armour."

The Major nodded. "Roger. And what about Unit 00?"

"No problem with the restart, nor any recurrence of the synchronicity issues. Some minor feedback in the neural networks, but that decreased as Pilot Ayanami moved around and got used to the Evangelion in the recovery of Zero-One," answered Maya, reading a fresh update off her data-slate. "A real battle is..."

"... not advised," finished Ritsuko.

"I'll take that advice under consideration," replied the Major. "Back on the topic of non-Euclidean geometries, though? You said that the Herald is impossible under conventional physics, yes?"

"Well, not directly," replied the doctor, somewhat taken aback, "but, yes. The universe may be Lobacheveskian on a universal scale, but the difference between that and Euclidean is very slight. That degree of space-time curvature does not happen normally. It has an infinite volume within the field, and its surface area tends to infinity as it expands fractally. The geometric interface drawn by the AT-Field really does separate universes. That's why Mot is black. With what it's doing to itself? I doubt you'd be able to hit its main body, even if you pierced the Field."

"So it's just the AT Field, then. If it's impossible without the AT-field, then if we punch through it..." said the Major, with a note of satisfaction in her voice. Misato smiled. "Get me the NEN database on the naval vessels in production."

"Excuse me?" asked Makota.

"I have one little thing to try first..."

~'/|\'~

The Field Marshals stared at the Evangelion Project's Director of Operations. There was a moment of silence. Then;

"You want to have the _Academia_?" blurted out Lehy.

Misato nodded. "Yes. I want to borrow the incomplete frigate in the Portsmouth naval yard."

Jameson asked the obvious question. "Why?"

"The _Academia_ has had its ventral laser fitted, and its Class-A D-Engine, as well as some of its A-Pods. However, it lacks any of its hull armour or any of its other armaments." She smiled. "It is, basically, a giant laser rifle for our purposes."

Kora cocked his head. "Ah. Long range fire from outside the target's hit detection range. We've seen what your charge beam did to it; I can see how you might want more firepower. But a Skuld-class frigate has less firepower than a Migou Swarm ship, and we saw what that did."

An alarm went off in the NEA Headquarters, and both Jameson and Lehy left the camera's viewpoint.

"Yes, Field Marshal Kora. That's why we have all the nanofactories in the Geocity ready to make some changes to the ship. Transmitting the files now."

Misato waited, her gut roiling with nervousness she did not permit her face to show, as the Marshal read through the alterations. The Nazzadi raised one eyebrow.

"So... you intend to case the ventral laser in supercoolant refrigerant units, run the entirety of the Class-A into them, and use the internal D-Engines of your Evangelion to boost the A-Pods to allow one of your Units to move it. The power for the laser itself will be drawn from almost the entirety the London-2 grid." The Marshal sat back. "Well, it's never been tried before. It is novel, I give you that."

"The MAGI give it a 12.6% percent chance of downing the Herald in a single shot, with an increased chance of 46.5% for eventual victory."

"Although I will also note that it also gives a 37.1% chance that the _Academia_ will be destroyed. That ship could, well, from what the Foundation has informed us, it could fund your Project for almost half a year."

He sighed, as she knew he would. "Approval given." His face suddenly looked very haggard. "I'd tell you to make sure that you don't fail or I'll have your head, but that won't mean much. If we can't stop the Herald, dead men can't fire you."

Misato nodded. "Understood, sir." She cut the connection to Headquarters, took a deep breath and adjusted her hair behind an ear. "Open a connection to NPF Portsmouth," she ordered.

The face of a slightly plump human woman appeared on screen, frowning at the Major over the top her AR glasses. Her eyes opened in shock as Misato used the over-ride function to open a new window on the woman's viewscreen, showing her authorisation documents.

"For all the reasons detailed on the document to your right, and authorised by the European High Command, the Evangelion Project, a specialist military research group of the Ashcroft Foundation has the right to commandeer the incomplete _Academia_, a Skuld-class frigate as of 15:00 today."

"But... but it's impossible. It's not finished..." the woman began.

"Please activate the A-Pods in preparation for transport by our Unit 00," added Misato.

"Wait? What?"

A broad smile crept over the face of the black-haired woman. "Just look out the window."

The head of the naval engineering team almost fainted when she saw the bulk of Unit 00 approaching the naval yard. There was a period where the engineers and arcanotechnicains argued among themselves, some objecting to the "theft" of their work-in-progress ship, and others acting like rampant fangirls at the sight of the Evangelion. Some of the fangirls were even female.

Eventually, they managed to boot up the internal engines, getting the A-Pods functioning, and formally transferred responsibility of the 200 metre long ship to the 40 metre tall Evangelion. With the A-Pods in neutral, merely keeping the ship off the ground, Rei began to pull the frigate behind her, as she headed back to London-2.

~'/|\'~

High above the freezing wastes of what had been Scandinavia, when humanity had still owned the north, a wing of high altitude bombers, stealth-proofed against detection hung in the air. You could see the curvature of the Earth from up here, and the sky seemed mostly black, the superior sensors of the craft permitting you to see the stars, should that be your desire.

Captain Schwartz, commanding officer of the 120 madmen and madwomen of Charlie Company turned off the link to the external sensors of the aircraft and focussed back on the interior of his Mk-11 Hussar powered armour. The first two companies of battalions in Task Force: Valkyrie were always Engel assault formations; he had command of the elite of the Hussars. Some would argue that a mecha pilot, by definition, was more sane than an Engel pilot, given that they had not had invasive brain surgery to implant cybernetics. Those people had not encountered Hussar pilots, who gleefully and willingly jumped out of planes at the edge of the atmosphere. Delta and Echo companies were also up here, but he was ignorant of their location, hidden as their craft were.

He ran a full check on his Hussar. The suit, akin to its predecessor, the Centurion, moved as its artificial muscles flexed and shifted beneath its matt black armoured shell. He moved his head, its robotic, inhuman head rotating as he checked left and right. To the left and right of him, and in other planes, the other veterans were doing the same. If your armour locked up mid fall, the best that could be said was that they wouldn't need to bury you. Normally shortly after landing his role was to get to a safe place, where he could command his troops, but the drop remained dangerous. Hussar Assault Formations had a very clearly defined chain of command, due to the risk of the higher-ups catching AA laser fire from a Strepsiptera. Those Migou units were evil things, small mecha that could cling to the outside of a larger vessel and had a hideous number of rapidly tracking laser cannons that could fill the air with coherent light.

"What's the difference between a punch in the face and a broken Hussar?" he muttered to himself. "One goes 'Whack! Aargh!'. The other goes 'Aaaaaargh! Whack!'"

Dark humour was a favourite of the soldiers of Charlie Company. And pretty much all of Valkyrie, come to think of it.

Except this wasn't just Valkyrie here, was it. There was an extra bomber with that giant Engel that the Brigadier has assigned to him strapped to the bottom, wrapped in radar-proofed foil. It was still compromising the stealth of the unit. He only hoped that the Migou would mistake it for a monitoring plane, if they noticed it. The Lares bombers were almost unarmed, to maximise their carrying capacity when so much was already taken up by the stealth systems and their dedicated D-Engines.

A bleep went off in his cockpit. It was time. He flicked on the broadcast system, dedicated laser communications allowing the other craft to hear his speech.

Asuka was hanging in the neutral buoyancy of the LCL, stretching as best she could by swimming around the Entry Plug, when an alert pinged up on the main screen. With a few movements, she pulled her way back into her seat, getting ready at the controls. She was vaguely aware that she was floating facedown, but they'd given her an injection to temporarily knock out inner ear function, leaving her with only the OSE from the Evangelion itself to tell if she was upright.

It was the Captain of the company she was being dropped with. She didn't really see how it was relevant to her. She was outside the conventional chain of command, had already been given her mission by Berlin-2 Command, and couldn't contact them due to the need for stealth.

"Valkyries," the man began, "it's that time again. We're sitting in our tin cans, at the edge of space, and let me tell you, that is a profoundly unnatural place to be. Well, we don't like unnatural stuff, do we, people?" He paused.

Oh, Asuka realised. It was some kind of speech, encouraging the rest of the troops to be big damn heroes or something. It just happened to be showing on her screen too, without the sound from the others.

"Damn straight, we don't like unnatural stuff. We don't like the fucking savages of the Rapine Storm,we don't like the butt-ugly fishmen and their fish-fucking worshippers, and we most certainly don't like the motherfucking bugs from Pluto." Captain Schwartz grinned then, the smile of a predator. "Well, it most certainly looks to be our lucky day!"

"We in Charlie Company have been chosen to be the ones who get first try at the Migou fleet below us. Delta and Echo are going to be following us in, but we're the tip of the spear that's going to tear the guts out of these bastards so that the rest of Valkyrie can finish them off. And you know why? We're the ones, because we are just that damn good. We wiped out the Loyalists at Calgary, burned their homes and put down their bug-serving support. We were first to the scene in the Dagonite attack on Santander, and we held the fish-fuckers off until the city was evacuated, killing six of them for every one we lost. And in China, we took down that flight of Shantaks who tried to intercept our drop, and went on to rip the heart out of that branch of the monsters despite having lost half the unit. We're the best of the best, and we know that as a fact."

His face become more sombre. "And this mission matters more than normal. The Migou have torn a hole in the defences of the British Isles, and the targets below us are rushing in to fill it. The Navy boys are trying to hold off the first fleet, but if this second one survives, the bastards will be able to push onto London-2, and maybe even open a second front in Europe. Some people might be scared by the prospect of going up against a Swarm Ship. Some people might be scared by the prospect of going up against ten Swarm Ships. Well, those people aren't the right sort of person for Charlie Company, because that is exactly what we are going to do! There is no god-damned way that we will let the Migou through do that while any of us can still kill. And so they won't succeed, because we are going to stop them!"

"Each squad has three demo charges. Two should breach the hull, then the third gets used in one of the listed locations, to cripple the bug ships. If that doesn't work, we'll do it as we have before; the hard way, with Mr Plasma and Mr Claw." His face shifted, taking on a subtly different appearance set in a look similar to that of heroes of old. "Do not fear the Migou, for they are weak when compared to you. I'm merely human and I have crushed their damn fungoid and Nazzadi traitor forces more times that I can count! And how did I do this? With human technology, human wrath and human genius, with you, my men and women! You! I look upon your faces and I see the salvation of the planet written in every single one. The fury and righteous indignation that will send the enemy reeling into the utter dark, I see in every one of you! I look upon you, and I feel no fear for our future. I have lost most of my body, and had it replaced because of the Second War and the Aeon War! Every piece of my flesh, every drop of my blood I gave willingly, because it served Humanity! I look upon you, and I can see the same willingness." The captain's eyes gleamed, bright in the light, reflecting blue in the glow of his control consoles. In that moment, he seemed to go beyond a man, and become an idea, that of the inevitability that humanity would prevail.

Asuka breathed deeply. The man had changed completely in that speech, becoming the kind of messianic leader that could rally a squad and lead them to certain death, in the knowledge that their deaths would be worth it for the species. And she would follow him.

But such righteous wrath could only last for a moment, and his voice returned to normal, as the man returned. "We've also got a new hell-jumper with us today. A new prototype Engel, one that can be dropped as we can, survive the burn from the edge of the atmosphere. Test Pilot Soryu will be assigned to target A1. Do not get distracted at the sight of something that weighs the same as two platoons coming down with us. Keep out of its way on the trip down. We are here to destroy the fleet, and I don't want my men taken out by bloody stupid mid-air collisions with something that we haven't trained with. We drop in two minutes. And remember. _Morituri Nolumus Mori_. Captain Schwartz out."

~'/|\'~

"We've got the restraining armour fixed," reported Maya.

The Major nodded. "Good. Sedate the Pilot, and get him to medbay." Misato frowned at the screen. "I'm just finishing this list of recommendations for High Command, then I'll be down to medbay myself, to check in him."

~'/|\'~

The clamps released, and the Hussars fell, their graceful arcs adjusted by their onboard Limited AIs. The challenge in this was roughly that of hitting a dart board from the other side of a city. Brute computation and the laws of motion prevailed where human intuition could not. In amongst the Hussars, like a hawk in the middle of a mob of sparrows, was Unit 02, arms spread wide as the experimental A-Pod booster packs on its back kicked in, adjusting its fall in the same way as the lesser human units.

Asuka concentrated, and projected out an AT-Field. She would get superior aerodynamic properties from it, the impossible, frictionless flat edges of the field cutting through the air like a heated blade.

_She sat idly in a chair,flicking through a book bound in vermilion leather. The type on the front was solid gold, she remembered, and that was important. The white walls seemed very oppressive, this was a book for richly decorated reading rooms and dim libraries._

"The soldier-leader relationship is one of the great flaws of humanity, you know," she had said to the elderly woman opposite to her. "Orders are obeyed without thinking, but also without believing. If you want to look at a superior model, I would recommend the hierarchy of the medieval Catholic Church. Faith and reason combined are superior to either separately."

The old woman had smiled, her voice cracked and ancient. "You have done well indeed. Most fail to learn that even throughout their life, too limited by their belief in flawed reason over faith."

Down below, the Migou second fleet was cutting over what had been Sweden, a fortified Migou hold-out against the NEG forces stationed in the Danish Territory. The humans could not attack them here, and much as they loathed having to evade the human defences, the first fleet had failed, taken down either by human treachery or the favour of the Endless Ones incarnate in Daoloth. Privately, the latter was believed to be more likely, but they had lost contact so quickly. The Hive Ship would be around soon, parked as it was in an opposing orbit to the freakishly large moon of this world.

It was then that they picked up a veritable hail of trajectories above them, all glowing hot and on an intercept course with the fleet. The fleet immediately flipped to full alert, as the Migou scrambled for their fighter craft. They didn't match the ballistic profile of missiles; they were dropping in far too steep an angle, and no launches had been detected. The possibility that it had been missed in the concentration on Daoloth was briefly considered, and ignored. As the objects got closer, their course adjusting for the evasion attempts of the Swarm Ships, a Migou technician on the command ship buzzed a warning. It had detected the Shield of Yog Sothoth from the targets, namely the larger one that they had assumed was ablative armour for the missiles. It was then that the Migou matched the smaller objects to the profile of human orbital drop armour, and a hail of fire opened up on the descending angels, as the Migou realised what the humans were doing.

Asuka's HUD was going wild, flashing icons all over the place as it picked up the Migou fighters that had just scrambled in a futile attempt to intercept the ballistic mecha. She ignored them, and adjusted her position, rotating in mid-air to let the A-Pods on her back have full effectiveness in slowing her, and co-incidentally getting in position to land hard on the Migou Ship the LAI was heading for.

Unit 02 **slammed** into the top of a Hive Ship, phantom pain shooting up Asuka's leg as the unnatural muscles of the Evangelion protested at the forces subjected to it. The Swarm Ship buckled and twisted under her impact, and lurched down notably as the momentum was transferred. She quickly recovered, leaping backwards, enabling the Dimensional Shields on her claws, and crippling a heavy laser cannon that was swivelling to face her. Rushing forwards again, she ripped the blades into the damaged hull, tearing a hole in the gut of the ship.

A flight of Darts strafed her back. She barely noticed it, as the biomechanical plates gave way to the strength of the Evangelion. She decided to aid it, and opened up with her lasers and charge beams, the beams cutting through the second layer. Suddenly, the plate came away, and she roared in triumph, her Evangelion roaring with her as she picked up the hull plate and hurled it away. The innards of the ship were vulnerable now.

Over on the ship to her left, a pair of blasts indicated that a squad had hit that ship successfully, breaking into the hull. The new hole was used as a gateway to the corpus of the ship, power armoured soldiers, clambering over the hull with their own, smaller claws to break into the guts, purging them with exceedingly hot plasma from their integrated cannons

Well, she lacked the ability to get inside, but she did have hot plasma. Asuka stuck her left arm into the wound, and triggered the experimental PP1-P, white hot ionised gas flooding the chambers of the ship. It burned through the interior walls, much weaker than the outer hull, expanding and tearing apart the Migou technology. The control centre of the ship, buried deep within the body for safety, had only time to watch the cancer of melted walls and blown out hangars spread through their vessel before the white heat claimed them too. The ship gave a shudder, and began to fall.

Asuka straightened up, scanning the rest of the fleet. She triggered her comms device.

"Captain, I've killed my assigned target. Do you have anything that your men have failed to get?"

There was a pause, and then Schwartz' face appeared, sweating profusely.

"Target A3 doesn't appear to have anyone," he gasped. "Plant that fucking charge, then we can get out of here," he yelled offscream, before the link cut.

Asuka smiled to herself. "A chance..." She then leapt up, in a great arc, landing on the next ship along, pausing only to crippled a laser cannon that tried to track her, before leaping into the air again, from Swarm Ship to Swarm Ship.

A thermal bloom arose from the hangar on the side of another ship, as the charge planted on the main D-Engine blew. Smaller figures scrambled out of the crippled beast, throwing themselves off the side. They were on their own from now on. They had to find a place for pick up, or make their own way back to NEG lines. They had nothing to fear from Assimilation, though; the NEG had thoughtfully implanted detonators in their skulls which exploded if they tried to leave the Hussar when they had set the device active.

There was chaos in the Migou lines, as the tip of Valkyrie was thrust into their own invasion force. It was only made worse when the large forces of the rest of the Task Force thrust north into Sweden, taking advantage into the hole in the defences which, in some inexplicable way, had now become the Migou's.

Asuka neared her target, which, perhaps aware of her presence, something that the Migou had long feared, was turning to retreat. She was firing as fast as she could with her head-mounted weapons, the gouges not doing much to the superior armour of the Swarm Ship. A rain of heavy laser blasts bore down on her; breaking the armour in multiple places and tearing into the flesh of Unit 02. The blasts and the phantom pain caused her to stumble.

This is not an advisable activity when one is trying to play hopscotch with 600 metre biomechanical leviathans, even when one is encased in a 40 metre tall cybernetic organism. The leap went wrong, her trajectory worryingly flat, which sent her slamming into the side of the Swarm Ship. She stuck her claws in, the blades enough to prevent her falling, and instead leaving her spread eagled onto the side of the ship, trying desperately to hang on.

"Nicht wie vorgesehen," she muttered to herself. Activating her feet claws, she dug them in, and began to work her way around the hull of the ship, trying to get on top. Two annoying sets of plasma cannons were silenced by the resort of her head mounted charge beams, and once again she blessed the fact that she was not using the obsolete Unit 01.

_Imagine the fact that the Third Child only has lasers mounted on Unit 01's head, and he lacks the PP1-P altogether. What would he have done against the last one? Electrocuted himself again?_

In her escapades, she found a hangar, unsealed. Perhaps it was launching units, or perhaps they were just trying to save what assets they could. Nevertheless, the opening, large enough to fit a Mantis out (it was, in fact, one of the typical ways they deployed, leaping from their ships in an inferior version to what she had just done), would also permit her access.

The Migou on this ship were, in fact, getting an introduction to Mr Plasma; a brief, though mostly painless (due to the speed of the death) one, when the icon for it on the HUD began bleeping an urgent red.

"Weapon Offline. Shut Down for Safety Reasons. Cooling Systems Fused," the LAI informed her. She had chosen a male, Nazzadi accented voice for hers.

"Idiot!" she yelled. "It's not safe to take my flamethrower from me!"

The LAI simply repeated the message. She decided secretly that she would get it changed; it suddenly sounded a lot less attractive. She withdrew her arm, and swung along the hull of the ship, now obviously listing as the damage she had inflicted began to tell. Hanging on with all four limbs, she adjusted her shoulders so that both of the mounted M-PACKs faced into the cavernous hangar.

She didn't wait for a lock bleep, instead triggering them together as a salvo of rocket death, the warheads blowing away the inner walls, already slagged and melted by the plasma cannon. The third salvo must have hit something important, as the glow from the engine ceased, and the Swarm Ship began its final decent. Asuka pulled herself up onto the top of the ship, the weapons now dead and no longer trying to target her.

The rest of the fleet was further away now; too far to jump. Even as she watched, the rest of Valkerie hit the six remaining ships... no, make that five, as she watched the internal explosions consume another vessel.

Asuka smiled broadly. She had done well, hadn't she. The Third Child was still ahead, as a Herald was obviously worth more than a Swarm Ship, but she had narrowed the lead considerably, and was now certainly thrashing the First Child. And given a chance to face the Heralds, well, she'd show them.

_I'll show the Ikari's. All of them._

She rode the carcass of the Migou ship to the ground, leaping off and landing gently as the behemoth was broken by its impact, crumpling and dying. She watched the carcass, the warmth of self congratulation filling her.

Then she headed off to the rendezvous point. This was Migou territory, after all.

~'/|\'~

Shinji opened his eyes, staring up at the white, well lit and subtly curved hospital ceiling. Again. Well, he wasn't going to move. He ached all over, and there was a horrible cold feeling in his chest.

Rei Ayanami leaned over into his field of vision, white hair cascading down over her face. She stared at him impassively. He got the feeling that, somehow, she was staring straight through him, that he was as pale and translucent as she seemed to be in this environment.

His eyes snapped wide open as his flight-or-fight reflect started to kick in. He could feel a major preference for the former.

"I've come to inform you of the schedule for Operation Ishtar," she said, in her soft voice. "The time of start has been provisionally set at 21:00 hours, but it is subject to change, based upon the activities of the extradimensional entity classified as a Herald and given the codename 'Mot'."

She reached into her pockets. She was still wearing her school uniform, he realised. Why was that? This was a Sunday? Didn't she have any other clothes to wear? Actually, come to think of it...

"What day is it? How long I have missed?" he asked.

Her hand froze, and she turned her head to stare at him. Shinji suppressed an urge to cower beneath the covers. "Today is Sunday, the thirtieth of September, 2091," she replied.

"Well, how did I get here?" he asked, hoping to get an answer which delayed whatever they wanted him to do now.

The gaze; not cold, as that would imply engagement with the target, but cool and dispassionate, similar to how a scientist might view a bacterium under a microscope, continued. "I retrieved Evangelion Unit 01, with you inside, from the combat zone. I then gave the damaged Unit to a recovery team, as ordered, who returned you to London-2 for repairs and the fitting of emergency restraint armour." The dread gaze ceased, as she looked down and drew out a PCPU.

"Pilots Ikari and Ayanami, come to the cage at 16:30 today. 17:00, activate Evangelion Units 00 and 01. 17:05, deploy the Evangelions. 17:20, arrive at the location where the _Academia_ has been positioned, and wait for orders. The target is expected to arrive in visual range at 20:42. The operation begins, subject to changes, at 21:00." After that singularly helpful briefing, the utility of which few others could achieve, she flicked the off button on the PCPU, reached down, and tossed a shrink-wrapped package onto the bed. It hit Shinji's legs; it was remarkably heavy.

"Here's a new one."

Shinji didn't pick it up. He'd been thinking, while she talked.

"Listen, Rei. Um. Thanks for rescuing me. I owe you... that is to say, I'm in your debt. Um."

Silently, he cursed how he always seemed to get tongue tied around her. Admittedly, the traumatic events of the Incident of the New ID Card (which he tried hard to forget, and she didn't seem to acknowledge even happening) probably had something to do with it. But during his stammering apology, her stare didn't change at all nor did, disconcertingly, any nuance of her expression. A slight curve upwards of the corners of the mouth, a raise of the eyebrows, a slight widening of the eyes were all classic signs of gratitude, the body language social glue that kept the unwritten rules of human (and Nazzadi, who had practised it even before contact) society functioning. The responses were unconscious, dating back to the common Chimpanzee, which only existed in managed enclaves, and the now-extinct bonobo, which languished in DNA records, waiting until the war was over before they would bring it back.

Yet Rei Ayanami showed none of them.

"It was my mission."

Shinji sat up, and looked at the package. It was a new plug suit. Internally he groaned. He saw Rei looking at him. Although he could not say if her expression had changed, he nonetheless received a different feeling off of her.

_Amusement? Sarcasm? Something else?_

She spoke. "Don't come out looking like that. It will be cold out there."

Shinji frowned at her for a moment, confused by her cryptic comment, then he realised that he was wearing nothing under the sheets. In sitting up and reaching out to see the contents of the plug suit package, quite another package had been revealed. Sheets were hastily gathered to cover himself.

_And was that just a joke? It was literally true, but it could also be deliberate understatement, and, well, we're in Britain..._

"Sorry." He managed a weak grin. "Well, at least we're even now."

There was no response.

"Sorry again."

An alabaster hand was raised to point at the tray by the side of the bed, without any words. Shinji picked it up. They quite thoughtfully hadn't provided anything solid, replacing it with the high-nutrient brew that soldiers were fed on in extended operations. He punctured the seal, and began sipping at it, staring into the middle distance.

"We depart in one hour." Rei's voice passed through his consciousness.

"Must I? Again? It hurts..." His voice was as soft as hers, filled with self-pity.

"Yes. You are the Pilot of Unit 01. It is your role to pilot."

"But I don't want to!" It came out as an agonised cry. "You can say that because you haven't..." Shinji fell silent. That was a very stupid thing to say. He'd seen her day after day in those bandages, growing used to her new eye; and the skin, he could see it was still slightly too young looking. He'd be right to say this to anyone else, but not to Rei, not to another Pilot.

He continued, in a softer tone. "You do know what it's like, don't you. How you always seem to end up hurt all the time. That feeling you get when the A-10s activate and your body suddenly becomes not yours. That you get the odd feelings when you're out of it, that you're back in it and that it's your own body that's not yours. The noises in your head when you make the AT-Field. The way that the LCL is just wrong, wrong, wrong!" The last words were shouted.

He looked over at her face. Rei's expression had shifted once again without changing. He felt, paradoxically, embarrassed to be saying this to her, and yet her presence seemed to suck the sound out of him, like a childish confession.

"I'll pilot Unit 01," she said, softly.

Shinji looked down at the bed covers, eyes closed. It was tempting, the deeper parts of his mind whispered. But his rationality overwhelmed it.

He wouldn't be safe if the Herald came to London-2. No-one would. And he'd seen it shred the Migou Swarm Ships. They did need everybody. And it felt wrong to leave it to Rei. She'd saved him last time, and unusual instincts, ones that he couldn't analyse and that pre-dated humanity were telling him that he needed to protect her.

"No," he muttered. "No," more clearly this time, "Tell them I'll be there."

Rei turned to depart, a pale ghost in this clinical purgatory. She paused in the doorway, turning back from the rounded portal to stare at him with those grey eyes.

"I will see you at the cage."

Shinji slumped back into the bed, feeling exhausted.

~'/|\'~

A gaggle of teenagers stood near the top of the arcology, looking out through the armoured windows to the north-east. Well, the north-eastish. They were not entirely certain where the spectacle they intended to observe was to emerge. Moreover, they were somewhat jumpy; there had been an arcology-wide broadcast telling everyone to retreat to the lower, subterranean levels, and although the deadline had not yet passed, the arcology police were likely to start moving people along. It was already dark in the direction they looked, the bulk of the arcology, like an artificial hill blocked the sun from those in its path. There had been complaints made by the enclave-towns in the Greater London Area, which had been viewed somewhat unsympathetically by the NEG.

We already help you enough by protecting you, was the gist of the argument. If you would but move into the arcologies, where you can be monitored, classified and genescanned properly, you wouldn't have to worry about the vicissitudes of natural weather and sunlight.

The group was a somewhat eclectic mix of individuals. The people who would be, by any reason classification be deemed 'geeks', 'nerds', or any other pseudo-pejorative linked to their intellectual obsessiveness and tendency to spend a lot of time in what what would have been called "indoors", were they not resident in an arcology, were there in force, complete with specialised cameras ready to seed the images all over the metanet. They were not there alone, however, as there was also a sizeable number of the Nazzadi Culturists. As their unofficial leader, Taly, had put it, "Giant killing robots are an important part of our culture as a race, and just look at those lines. Tell me that the Evangelion doesn't look more like a _Vadoni_ or a _Oryladi_ than a Scimitar or a Claymore. Well, in fairness it looks more like a Seraph than either, but it looks more Nazzadi than human."

The fact that she could name the models off by heart was memorised by a fair number of males and a lesser number of females. That she also appeared to be a bit of a mecha fangirl was a useful bit of knowledge for potential dates.

Toja drummed his fingers against the transparent wall. "We should go get to the cover. I'm tired of waiting."

"I think that's the right lift shaft on the arcology wall down there." asked Ken. "I was only able to get the general location from what I could glance of my dad's stuff."

"But they're not here," replied Toja, dragging the last word out in a deliberately childish manner.

They waited.

"And what are you doing up here?" asked a cool, authoritarian voice.

"Dammit," muttered Ken. "I'm sorry, officer, but we were just looking out at the natural world," he began.

There was only Hikary, standing there with her arms crossed and strange, half-smile on her face.

"Did you say that?" asked Toja, a stupefied look on his face.

She grinned, then. "Yes. My father's had me taking Command and Elocution out of school, and I wanted to see if it worked. It does."

"What are you doing here," the Nazzadi boy asked.

"Some of the girls invited me along, for a "surprise treat". Just because I'm half-Nazzadi, they keep on trying to get me to be more like that. What are you doing here? And you can't lie, Kenneth Suke Aide. Not to save your life."

Under this ferocious interrogation, and the rather more real prospect of her gabbing him by the ear and dragging him off, Toja cracked.

"We heard that Shinji and Rei were being deployed from here. We wanted to get a look at them before we were forced to go down..."

"That's what she..." began Ken, somewhat reflexively, before a many-eyed glare from most of the surrounding students silenced him.

Toja was chief among the glares. "To go down to the bunkers," he continued. "Idiot..." He turned to exclude Ken from the conversation. "We will be going soon, if that idiot," gesturing at Ken, "was wrong about the location."

Hikary sighed. "No, he's not." Noticing the stares, she shrugged. "Well, we're almost all Ashcroft Children here. I... had a look," she confessed, a faint pink blush on her grey cheeks.

"It's moving! The wall's moving!" called Taly, over from by the window. The teenagers rushed to the wall, and flattened themselves against the transparent material.

From the wall, the literally Cyclopean bulk of Unit 00 emerged first, orange armour given a plain grey covering, the anonymous grey of plastic swathing its colour. There hadn't been time for a proper camouflage scheme, what with the necessity of obtaining the _Academia_ and, later, the large section of its hull that was strapped to Rei's arm, the massive plating trimmed down to the size of an Evangelion by layering it multiple times. It had been hoped that the bulk might, with the reinforcement of an AT-Field, take one, and possibly even two blasts from the Herald, which was all that they could hope for. As it emerged, the single eye swung its gaze over the environment.

It was followed by Unit 01. That Evangelion did not look much like the images that the watchers had seen. Everything from the waist upwards had been replaced with the cruder restraining armour. Where there had once been the sleek lines and organic curves, vaguely similar to a demon from Japanese myth, the top half of Unit 01 was now obviously a machine, a thing of harsh angles and blue-grey steel. The restraining armour, despite being thicker than its normal armoured shell, provided less protection. The bulked artificial muscles ran, exposed, over the surface of the obscuring materials that concealed the unnatural flesh that composed the Evangelion. As it walked, the force applied could be seen. Even the head was different, as the beam of the Herald had melted the face of the Evangelion. A crude armoured skull-like mask, the jaw sealed in and only the glow of the eyes emanating from the empty sockets, masked the synthetic organism's visage.

There were, nonetheless cries of "Awesome!", "Cool!" and other such comments from the watchers. As they looked on, the two forty-metre figures strode off into the ruins of the Greater London Area, around the enclaves that clustered around London-2 like chicks beside their mother-hen.

~'/|\'~

And now the two titans lay face down, positioned to prevent them poking out over the buildings. The NEG had commandeered the entire Kensington Enclave, for the proximity of the now-overgrown Hyde Park, and the population had been evicted and moved into the arcology. It was silent; the calm before the storm. The air was quiet, as the military preparations here had already finished, and faintly, in the distance, a nightingale sang. It was astonishing how the ecology had changed, as the Greater London Area returned to nature and wildlife recolonised the world. Once, this place had been packed with museums, embassies, and a university. All of them had now retreated to the arcology, although many of the museums were rather bereft, as the predecessors to the OIS had gone through their entire inventory and confiscated huge numbers of historical artefacts. It remained a home for the rich, though, as the proximity to nature and the large houses, updated to modern standards, drew in those who, for one reason or another, preferred not to live in arcologies.

It was for that reason that the NEG ran very frequent blood and brain scans through this area. The choice of the location was not purely tactical, too. The London-2 authorities would not in any way be displeased if this Enclave was destroyed through hostile action or 'accident'.

Shinji sat beside Rei, on top of the building that had been the Royal Albert Hall, now converted into a private residence. It seemed odd that the dome had survived the Nazzadi bombardment in the First Arcanotech War, but it had. They sat and stared out over the wooded area before them, bathed in moonlight. It was a full moon tonight, and it shone bright. Shinji looked over at Rei, who sat, gazing out over the decaying ruins of the city. The light made her seem ethereal, transient, like a piece of transparent paper folded into the shape of a girl, ready to blow and fall like a leaf, ending up crumpled on the floor.

He thought over the plan for the upcoming battle, imparted to him by Misato. She seemed completely different, as if another woman, with all her memories but little of her personality was occupying her body; a cool, efficient commander. He was manning the _Academia_. Frankly, he had disbelieved the idea at first. It seemed some special plan to get him, Shinji, to commit suicide. But the 200 metre long ship, mounted like a squad support weapon on the fortification they had erected in the middle of Hyde Park, was really real. She had told him that Unit 01 was the damaged one, and thus he would be the one manning the weapon. When the fact that ventral laser and its assorted D-Engine and all the supercoolant systems that Ashcorft Foundation technicians had spent all afternoon welding to the exposed superstructure was five times as long as Unit 01 was tall, it made a rather peculiar image. A metre thick cable snaked from the weapon into the body of Unit 01, which gave him control over the firing. Some of the technicians had suggested making a giant trigger for him to squeeze, until Major Katsuragi had found out about it and had, with much profanity, told them to stop being stupid.

Rei hadn't moved since he had last looked at her. She had a shield, made from the welded together parts of the hull of the _Academia_, layers of superfluidic helium-4 sandwiched between the separate pieces. It was hoped that the superfluid, where the waveforms of the helium overlapped, making them move as one, would help negate the effects of the attack by the Herald, but it would only do so much, as the puncture from the front would rapidly heat the Bose-Einstein condensate up, blowing off the front layer of the shield as the gases expanded. And Rei was directly behind that shield, to interject her self between him and the Herald that had hurt him so much.

"You know, we may die," he said to her.

_On reflection, probably not the best conversation starter in the history of mankind._

She didn't respond to the stupidity, though, giving it the due thought that she gave everything.

"You will not die," she stated softly, "because I will protect you. If you die, then London-2 will die. And then I will have failed."

He looked at her, his head cocked at an angle. "Is that why you do it? Why you put yourself through... the things with the Evangelions?"

She looked down at her crossed legs, gloved hands resting on her lap, and then up again. "I pilot her because of my ties."

"Your ties?" asked Shinji. "To London-2? To my father?" he said, hating himself for the last one.

She then looked at him. "To everyone. If the species does not survive, then everything will have been pointless. The world needs to be saved."

Shinji nodded. That line of logic, although somewhat nihilistic, made sense. The Strange Aeon was not a time for faith. The gods, loathsome entities which cared nothing for mankind had slain God, or at least the idea of God. How could one have faith in something that did not exist? And so people had regrouped to humanism, taking reassurance in shared humanity and the declaration that we were better (in some indefinable sense) than everything else in the cosmos.

"I have nothing else," she muttered, her voice a sighing in the wind

Shinji heard it, though. "Nothing else?" he queried. He realised then how little he knew about her, at a more than superficial level. He knew that she lived alone, but he did not know why. He knew that there was something between his father and her; he had seen her (seen them both, the cynical voice in the back of his head added) acting like a normal person.

She did not answer, standing up and stretching, elegant on the balls of her feet even in the heavy plug suit. Her face was raised up to the moon, and as the gaze of one pale maiden met another, Shinji got an inexplicable shiver down his back, and he thought he heard some kind of movement of air currents above him, a faint leathery sound.

"It's time to go" said Rei. She turned those grey eyes on him, limpid pools of superfluid helium, and blinked once.

"Goodbye."

~'/|\'~

The Herald floated serenely towards London-2. Nothing struck against it; no projectiles fell to break upon its AT-Field. The NEG had gambled a lot on the behaviour observed in its first contact remaining true. It had only attacked things that came close to it, or that attacked it, and so they had let neither of those two states occur, retreating any forces out of its way.

But the Herald itself was changed from its original shape. The tetragonal trapezohedron was marred now, the smooth geometries covered in the fractal shapes that protruded from its surface, each one tessellating impossibly; a smaller, budding version of its original shape. The entire thing was the product of a warped mind, a true madman, and yet it was real. The NEA had exhausted its stocks of RALCL serum on doping these troops; the process in the London Geocity that produced it was still experimental, they had been told, and so production quantities were limited. It was already rationed; the rear echelon troops had not been given it, and so were under strict instructions not to look at it. It was all that they could do.

The mass of the London-2 Arcology was a darker silhouette against the night sky. The power had been cut, as superconducting fibres, a fine capillary network throughout the city, all converged and were prepared for the massive currents that would flow through them. As long as the electrons within were restrained to their superconducting state of Cooper pairing, they would be fine, but were any to fail or warm up, the cascade of heat that the burnout would cause could cripple veins. Inside, even the ventilation had been set to a minimum, and the weather systems turned off. It was already starting to get a little warm inside.

"The time is approaching Zero-Hundred hours" Maya said over the network as the counter on Shinji's HUD ticked down the last few seconds, then went to zero.

"Commencing operation!"

"All right Shinji, we're trusting nearly the entire power output of London-2 into your hands. Do it right!", stated the Major.

_You could have at least said "Do your best!",_ thought Shinji. _I don't like Misato as the Major. On the other hand, the Major might actually clean up after herself..._

No! Focus, baka Shinji!

"Okay," he replied.

"Right, this is it!" commanded the Major. "Begin the connection sequence!"

In the NEG Headquarters, they received confirmation that the power-up had started for the _Academia_. Thus, the conventional assault began as planned.

The vast array of the defences of London-2, silenced by the orders from Headquarters, opened up with the vengeance and the wrath of an angry god. The atmosphere filled with ionisation trails, as the ferocious batteries of charge beams, plasma cannons and lasers opened up, blue-green trails sketched in the air. The rocket exhausts filled the sky, a false dawn out of the wood etchings of the medieval Catholic church as the flames lit up the sky.

_A livid sky on London_, thought Rei, ensconced in Unit 00. _And I knew the end was near._

The Herald did not sit back and take it, though. The new, fractal facets, shifting in a motionless way most disturbing to the eye reached out with their black beams and kissed the missiles. The aflame sky was filled with detonations, as a cascade of metal rain bounced off the AT-Field of Mot. It then began firing off more beams, each one perfectly placed, into the things that dared harass it. A larger blast punched into one of the major banks of charge beams and dug a cavern, perfectly spherical, five hundred metres into the London Arcology.

"Third connection, no problem!" called out Makota, his voice calm as he monitored the banks.

"Release the final safety connections," ordered the Major, as she watched the map turn to ill. The Herald punched all around it with its Stygian embrace, removing blue NEG icons from the map with horrific ease.

"Temperature of the _Academia_ is functional. We should have twelve seconds of sustained beam before we have to let it cool down, given current input," added Lieutenant Aoba, his thin, spiderlike fingers running through the AR interface.

The advanced targeting system was displayed on Shinji's screen, as he crouched behind the fortifications, the stripped-down frigate mounted on the defences like a stationary machine gun. Rei was in front of him, crouched behind her own fortifications with the additional benefit of the shield. With the amplified senses of the targeting mode, Shinji could see the frost on the supercold slabs of metal. Code ran across his screen (eyes? Was it running along the inside of his eyes?";

**Code:**

##OPEN "MKPLANOFDOOM"  
# RUN ""

Program designed for compatibility with Skuld-class frigate to allow advanced targeting and interface, accounting for variables

Last alterations 19:46  
Authors: S. Aoba, M. Ibuki,

Adjusting direct parameters...  
Fluctuations of power source...  
Corrected  
Local spacetime curvature...  
Corrected  
Arcanotechnology induced variables...  
Corrected  
Atmospheric composition...  
Corrected  
Ionisation of atmosphere (Inferred)...  
Corrected  
Effects of AT-Field (Evangelion)...  
Corrected  
Effects of AT-Field (Target)(Inferred)...  
Corrected  
Miscellaneous Corrections...  
Corrected

Outside effects have been adjusted for. Targeting reticle synchronisation complete.

Fire when able.

Program is running in tabs.

He raised his eyebrows at the naming convention. He knew that the technicians had a somewhat peculiar sense of humour, and he supposed that the "Big Laser" bit was right, but still...

_There is such thing as propriety, after all._

Red lights screamed in the control centre.

"Channel 3-44!" called out Maya. "We've got a heat cascade. Isolating the superconductors... isolated." Her hands flew through the AR model before her, looking more like martial art katas than conventional computing. "Re-routing... and done," in a triumphant voice. "Minimal loss in efficiency."

"Fire when ready!" ordered the Major. "Don't take too long; we don't know how well the system can hold!"

Before Shinji, in the urban ruin before him, the Herald could only be seen as a blacker shape in the night. No stars were visible through it, and the black lances of the AT-Field that came from its bulk, no longer a pure tetragonal trapezohedron, could only be seen by inference. He swung the mass of the ship towards it, but before the reticle could turn red, the converging parts in unity, Rei in Unit 00 stood upright, in front of him, bracing the shield.

"What is she doing!" yelled Ritsuko.

The Herald fired then. It obviously had detected the massive energy build-up far from it, in a quiet sector where the barrage of fire that had been hitting it did not originate.

It lanced out. Rei stood resolute. The white girl in the grey Evangelion was engulfed in a beam of ultimate darkness, the black of the interstellar void. The first layer of the shield was torn away, the baryons that composed it flying away in all directions at high speeds. The wrinkle in spacetime, generated and restrained by the will of Mot, then hit the layer of superfluid helium-4. The peculiar quantum state, that that form of matter possessed, proved to thwart its will for three seconds, until ambient heat broke the unified waveform into separate wave packets. The liquid helium then quickly evaporated, tearing the front of the shield off as the freezing gas expanded, each cubic metre of liquid becoming 754 cubic metres of gas. Rei was forced back by the horrific momentum imparted by the flash-heating, but the clouds of vapour and the atmosphere that froze around it severed to alabate the beams of the Herald.

The clouds of gas had knocked the calculations of the LAI out. It readjusted, and Shinji followed its dictates to swing the ship into position. He squeezed the trigger in the cockpit, sending the signal to the ventral laser.

Against the Stygian beams of the Herald, Unit 01 fired pure light, of the blue-green wavelength used in naval operations. Powered by 96% of the energy output of London-2, an arcology of 30 million souls, the beam suddenly was, punching into the lowered AT-Fields that fuelled the beam. It punched clean through the Herald, the hideous energy of the laser frying the air around it. Even the scattering from atmospheric particles was enough to blind anyone who looked at it, the blue-green blade the colour of the planet Earth against the extradimensional invader.

The Herald remained aloft, though, even though now, stars, the usual stars, could be seen through the wound. All of its beams, those dark manifestations ceased, as it pulled all back into a concentrated AT-Field. The burning white light of the field, so concentrated was it, outshone the scattering of the laser. Shinji swept the _Academia's_ laser across it, but it moved the AT-Field with him, the shield of its soul protecting its body.

The Herald had all of its AT-Field in that place, leaving only a little to maintain its integrity in the cold cosmos. The fire of the rest of the NEG forces still alive slammed into its unprotected facets and fractal curves, chipping tiny fragments of the void that fell to the ground and writhed and wriggled. It did not care. It now did not care for anything but survival. What it encountered now threatened its life, its very existence. If it fell now, it would not be. In some sense, if it was destroyed, it would have never been, for the Crawling Chaos did not appreciate failure and could remove its self, the sense that it had been anything other than a mindless automation that had appeared to think, like the beings that tried to kill it now.

No, that was not true. The Beast Nyarlothotep appreciated failure greatly. It was amused by the fall of empires and the deaths of gods. What it lacked was any possible sympathy or regrets for the fallen, or for the victor too, for they would fall soon enough.

It held out the Shield of Yog Sothoth and willed to live.

The heat levels on the ventral laser were rising rapidly.

"It's not breaking through!" called Lieutenant Aoba. "10 seconds until automatic shutdown. Seven..."

"Keeping firing, Shinji," called Misato, hand on mouth.

"Six..."

Rei straightened up, the crude shield damaged but not useless. The blue-green beam ran over her shoulder, clashing with the blinding white. The air was boiling, streams of ionised gas flowing away from the lance of light. The very air around her was a plasma; she could feel it burning, weakly, though the sympathetic pain. Yet it wasn't enough. The Herald could weather this storm; though its sails may be torn and its side splintered, it remained afloat. And then, when the laser overheated and fused, it could annihilate Unit 01 in a apocalyptic blast.

"Five..."

She could not stop that. Even the blast that she had stopped had burned away a quarter of her shield, and it had been interrupted by the actions of Pilot Ikari. Saving her by opening fire. And if Pilot Ikari died, she would have failed in her mission. Failed in both of them. And as it currently lay, as the future ran in front of her pin-prick eyes, it was inevitable. The laser would over heat and he would die first. She would die next, trying to stop the floating fortress with a charge.

Then London-2 would die. And she would die again. And Representative Ikari would die.

Rei clutched her shield tight, and rose into a sprint directly towards Mot.

"Four..."

"Die! Die! Die!" screamed Misato into the microphone, as if the Herald could hear her. "Just die!"

She demolished buildings as she ran through the dead city, the buildings of a more civilised age crushed by her shins. The Evangelion roared, even as she remained ice cold, a strange pricking feelings in her shoulder blades.

"Three..."

"What's Rei doing?" asked Ritsuko, voice muffled by the knuckle clamped in her mouth.

She was getting closer now, the strange geometries and the hyper-dimensional intrusions curving and twisting to her sight as her change in position altered the way that the immersions of the n-dimensional objects appeared in three dimensional space. The interface between the universes was warped and twisted by the damage that they had inflicted upon the Herald, and so the scars and wounds seemed to flow across its apparently protean surface; even as the cross-sections changed, the gashed stayed still. It did not move, however, the void seemingly crawling before Rei's eyes as it tried to save its own life. Even with the buffering of an EFCS, the other Pilots would have been severely affected by the impossibility before their eyes. Rei was not. It existed, so it was not impossible. It was real, so it was not imaginary. It was no use judging the universe by the preconceptions of an uplifted race of chimpanzees whose brains were designed for the vector calculations of passage through trees, when the true beauty of the n 3 + 1 universe stood before you.

_But the beauty must die_, she thought, _in the name of the species and the ties that bond me to it._

"Two..."

Aoba's voice remained calm; almost unnaturally so.

"Focus on the centre of the target, Pilot Ikari," ordered Rei, even as threeplex universes ran before her eyes as she charged the Herald, shield locked in front of her body; the air resistance no objection to her passage. Shinji complied, and the roar of the vaporised air swung towards Rei, the beam nearly directly over her head.

Lit by the light that shone through deep oceans, the White girl leapt into the air and slammed the shield into the mass of the Herald, the infinitesimally thin fractal edges of the abomination piercing the layers and lodging into it. Even as the superfluid flash-boiled into gas, she pulled the legs of Unit 00 up in mid air, digging them into the hooks for her arms and pushing up again, riding the force of the gaseous helium and the explosive blast.

Right towards the centre of the Herald and the point where the ventral laser of the _Academia_ clashed with the AT-Field.

"One!" Some emotion finally crept into the Lieutenant's voice.

The pale girl in her grey Evangelion was lit by the brightness of the nigh unstoppable force and the near unmovable object. Silhouetted by the brilliance, that of some malevolent angel whose only hypothesis was on the destruction of all life, she ascended into the light, hands outstretched and a nascent AT-Field forming around them.

In that frozen moment of contact she reached out, gently (and yet oh so quickly), and ripped open the soul of the Herald. The blue-green light, seeking, questing, reached through the hole and pieced the heart of the ancient god-like being, piercing the red orb that blinked but once when its veil of darkness was broken. The red was extinguished by the focussed light, the wrath of humanity, and the spear continued, breaking through the other side with no effort and shining out, far into space.

And thus the Herald ceased.

Rei continued in her path, though, and the terrible bladed darkness was still there. It pieced the ceramic shell of Unit 00 in many places, even as the corpse of Mot shattered and fell, like the abode of a dead king, extinguished by the blue-green light of the sea. It listed and fell, crashing down to the ground.

"Weapon shutdown. We've got widescale meltdown of components, the cooling units are fried and..." began Lieutenant Aoba. He blinked, as the distorts of the target's AT-Field vanished from the sensors. "And the target is destroyed."

The technicians and the rest of the Ashcroft team whooped and cheered. The celebrations spread to the NEG Headquarters almost instantly, as they picked up the death of the Herald too.

Shinji, however, dropped the converted ship, as parts of it glowed red hot, and ejected the link-up, following Rei's path through the old city, a twin pair of footprints smashing the concrete to rubble. He paused as the bulk of the deceased Herald became evident, then launched himself upwards onto the splintering bulk. Without the AT-Field, the fractal spikes were no long infinitesimally sharp, and so they could be climbed on, even by the more bulky Restraining Armour fitting to Unit 01. Even though occasionally fractal branches, now sometimes seeming to be made out of some kind of strange glass that was not natural to the world, would break off, Shinji could still pull himself up.

Unit 00 was impaled in a large branch, one that did not penetrate the back. It no longer shifted when the viewer moved, because with the death of the Herald, the immersion in three dimensions became the object itself. Gently, Shinji picked up the mecha, holding it in his arms like a child. The grey armour was marred, pierced all over the front, and red blood leaked out, cascading down the ruined breastplate. There was a faint bubbling over the surface, too, as the massive amounts of energy he had been dumping into the environment had made the air into a plasma, and melted her armour.

Carrying it, he lowered it to the ground a distance away from the black hulk and the obsidianesque needles that it shed, as it crumbled after its death. The back, where the entry plug was inserted, was pried open, and the tube removed, as gently as he could.

He placed her entry plug on the ground, and ejected his own. Running over to her metal tube, hair and face soaked in LCL, cold in the breeze, he put his hands on the wheel, and turned as fast as he could.

The prongs bent and warped in his hands. He continued to wrench at the wheel, and eventually (and how long it seemed) the door opened, soaking him in a second flood of LCL. He poked his head inside.

Rei sat slumped in her command chair, fingers clutched into claws on the arms of her chair. Soaked in LCL, just as he was, she appeared more normal, the orangish veneer giving her skin a melanin-like tint.

"Ayanami!" he called desperately. "Are you alright? Ayanami? Rei!"

She twitched, and stirred, opening those pale eyes and staring at him. The gaze was, as usual, cool.

Shinji,however, felt his eyes well over. He smiled weakly.

"That was... that was a bit stupid. And utterly amazing." He wiped at an eye. "Don't... don't ever say that you have nothing else. You have more to fight for than just that. You're... you're just brilliant, like a star."

She listening to his babbling with an impassive face. Shinji began to sob, overcome with the release of all the accumulated stress and nervous energy from the last day.

The pale girl sat forwards.

"Why do you cry?" she said, in a voice even softer than usual. "Ambition should be made of stronger stuff." Shinji looked at her, from between hunched shoulders. "I'm sorry. I don't know how to express myself in situations like this. I... I," she continued, her voice, unbelievably breaking somehow, "... I just know this to be true."

Shinji then looked at her, properly, a faint look of pity (he knew not from which source) in his eyes.

"You could try smiling," he suggested.

He watched her eyes flicker, like the movements of a dreamer, then they focussed on him again.

Her face twisted into a half smile.

It wasn't much, but it was a start.

~'/|\'~

The Director of the Chrysalis Corporation, nearly on the other side of the planet, sat back in its seat and laughed and laughed and laughed. Around it, its Dhohanoid servants frolicked and played, the perversion of their activities enough to challenge sanity.

All empires must end. All thrones must be toppled. It is a law of the universe.

The being that the humans had, with their limited insight, called Mot, had been favoured by it. What it failed to see was that the Crawling Chaos had merely granted it a whim of favour because its worship had amused the Faceless God for a while. And the amusement had ceased all too long ago; it was so lacking in imagination, so caught up in the petty machinations of its fellow priests of the Outer Gods, that it had calcified and decayed from what it had once been.

And too many have reigned too long, holding their authority over their worshippers, subjects and citizens. Even its cult, the Children of Chaos could not comprehend it, for they would not see the fundamental truth. So many thousands worshipped it on this petty rock, and none of them would see that every action ensures the spread of entropy in the universe. There is no need for deeds that primitive morality systems would have called evil, because every deed further its goals. It was merely that some deeds amused it more than others. And they were all so blind to that simplicity. The Second Law of Thermodynamics described Nyarlathotep's nature much more accurately than a thousand occult texts, yet again and again the barely sapient beings (and all beings were barely sapient, compared to it) fell upon ritual and ceremony, where simple knowledge would have sufficed.

All, but its servant in the Evangelion Project. That one had seen right through to as much of its true nature as such a pathetic being could.

That servant would ensure that the most amusing outcome would emerge. And all though their own plans; the Queen in Red had not needed to suggest anything.

That one bore promise...

~'/|\'~


	9. Chapter 7: A Quantum of Respite

**Chapter 7**

A Quantum of Respite

~'/|\'~

The nanofactory bleeped as the coffee granules were assembled. They were promptly removed, and immersed in boiling water, while a cupboard was opened and, with a slight rush of air, the seal broken on the fish-substitute. There was a second, different bleep as the rapid infusion process was completed, even as a scraping noise indicated the 100% vegan-compatible fish (like almost all modern meat) was served to the ravenous penguin on the floor, which began to devour it, the teeth lining its beak tearing the shaped protein into something that could be swallowed by a creature that, despite all its genetic alteration from its giant albino ancestors, still lacked the ability to chew.

Yes, it was amazing how the abnormal could become mundane.

Shinji sat back down at the table, and stretched, feeling the ache of the healing skin over his chest. The bandages had come off, but it still felt slightly raw.

_Someday I will find whoever first suggested the idea of a giant robot where the pilot gets physically hurt if he's piloting well enough. And then we will have a short talk, about not being bloody stupid._

He sipped at the tea, as Pen-Pen wolfed down his faux-fish. There was yet another ping, as the toaster proclaimed that it had not only cooked the bread, but also strategically applied butter and a predetermined spread. Shinji recovered the food, and bit down just as a disorganised amorphous mass of flesh, strange black tendrils sprouting from its head, face locked in a grimace that could induce fear in the bravest man emerged. A strange noise, half-roar, half-screech emerged from its maw as it pulled its upper appendages back, perhaps to strike.

Misato stretched. Her dishevelled person was still only clad in her sleeping garments, although she didn't seem to care about that.

_Ah. They obviously went to the same school of thought as the genius who suggested making a slob, with what might be seen as Nazzadi attitudes to clothing, the guardian of a teenage boy. I really cannot believe that this is the same woman who was running the operations against the Herald._

For all that the Evangelion Project is in theory staffed by geniuses, they seem to have found all new and remarkable ways to be stupid.

Misato shuffled over to the fridge, opening her first beer of the day, enveloping rather than drinking the alcoholic beverage. Shinji concealed his slight sneer. She had caught his attempt to stock the fridge with non-alcoholic beer, justifying her apparent rampant alcoholism with the idea that she worked better when she was "slightly buzzed".

"Yeah! This is how my morning begins," she declared, as she slammed the can down onto the table, crumpling it.

"Not with coffee?" replied Shinji, staring at her.

"Wark! Wark-wark!" added Pen-Pen, staring at her through his small eyes.

"Shinji, we both know that the traditional Japanese breakfast begins with miso soup, rice and sake," Misato said, as she pulled up a chair and sat cross-legged upon it. "You are dishonouring your ancestors with your disapproval of me drinking a little beer at breakfast. And," she continued, wagging a finger in his general direction, "it's practically a law that beer can be drank at any time you wish in England. So, there!"

Shinji didn't reply.

"Oh, yeah! Misato 2, Shinji 0!" she added triumphantly, as she grabbed some toast.

Shinji finished the rest of his breakfast in silence, while Misato got to work on devouring the toast. He cleared up his plates, and began to load them into the machine. He then remembered what was going to happen today.

"Are you really coming to school today?" he asked, dreading either answer.

"Of course," she replied, spraying crumbs of toast over the kitchen floor. "It's one of those half-termly reports as well as a parent-teacher conference on your future."

"But it's not like I'm really going to have a choice, is it?" he answered, a gloom descending upon him as he contemplated his future. "I'm going to end up piloting Unit 01 no matter what happens. My father will see to that," he added, with a twist of bitterness. "And aren't you going to be busy, anyway?"

"Oh, come on, Shinji," Misato said, finally removing the toast from her mouth. "You'll always have a choice. The NEG doesn't do conscription; we're all volunteers. There'd be an outcry if we started dragging people off to fight."

Shinji grunted, in a non-committed way.

"And anyway, we're sort of quiet right now. They've finished the repairs on Rei's Eva, and they can't start work on yours until... something technical, about spare parts, happens. I've got an update this morning. And, quite a few parents are going to be away at the Academy's PT conferences. And I don't mind doing it, it's part of my job."

There was silence in the apartment, underlined by the hum of the dishwasher, as both Misato and Shinji realised what she'd said.

It was broken by the doorbell ringing.

Shinji glanced over at Misato.

"Please, don't come out looking like that. It's embarrassing," he said, blushing faintly, before heading off to the door with his bag.

"Don't forget that you've got a PyschEval at the Clinic after school today," she called after him.

He managed to guide the pair of Toja and Ken (his brain mentally substituted "those slobbering idiots") away from the building without giving them the chance to stare at Misato that they so obviously desired, forcing to console themselves with a wave from her arm.

_Cleaning up after Misato, keeping these two away from her, piloting a giant ferocious biomechanical eldritch abomination which kills cosmic horrors... it's hard work. No wonder that I'm getting a few white hairs; the stress can be horrific at times,_ he thought to himself, with a mixture of self-pity and self-parody.

Back in the apartment, Misato picked up the phone, and called a designated number.

"Acedia is away, in company of," she ran her eyes down the list on names with attached pictures on her PCPU, "uh, 'Pentheus' and 'Hector'," she reported, referring to Toja and Ken respectively.

She sat back down, as she got the affirmative. Misato really didn't know why they insisted on her phoning in; it wasn't as if Shinji wasn't tracked every metre by multiple cameras. Arcologies were heavily supervised anyway, and the routes either one of the Children could take were more so than usual.

She slumped back, grabbing another beer. She really wasn't looking forwards to the parents-teachers meeting (formally called a parents-guardians meeting in the Academy.) Usually, parents had... some years to get used to it, when the children were more playing around with paint and clay and stuff, rather than long term academic choices. Man, how many employees had she had to given permission to take some time off today? Something nagged at the back of her mind about that. Something about the technicians and staff on the Project.

She shrugged. She still had to be in for the morning, for that status update.

_You'd think that they could have chosen a better day for the meeting, was all._

~'/|\'~

"So, give me the full status of the two Evangelions," stated Ritsuko, sitting back in her chair. The senior staff in the Evangelion Project were all gathered here, although the meeting was moved forwards from its original time due to the number of staff that would be unavoidably absent in the afternoon. She was somewhat annoyed by this, but the status report was not high enough priority to justify cancelling their leave. Through the window, they could look down upon the two massive figures, waist high in coolant in a matter akin to statues to drowned and forgotten gods. Small figures clustered around the orange figure, its layers of camouflage paint removed to better inspect it for damage. The figure beside it, purple on those bits not obscured by the restraining armour, on the other side of the partition, stood alone and silent, its armour marred and untouched.

Maya cleared her throat. "Both Unit 00 and Unit 01 suffered major damage during the engagement with the last Herald," she began, bringing up images of the two mecha on the tabletop projector. The swathes of red that marred the holographic projection only layered emphasis upon her words. "I can report that Unit 00 is almost fully functional. Its biochest was heavily damaged, but the Damage Control System managed to seal it off, along with the natural clotting factor. It's a flaw of the Evangelion genetic material that its natural regeneration had to be dampened to install the cybernetic components."

Glancing over at the grimace on the face of her mentor at the unfortunate comparison that bought to the Engels, Maya blushed slightly, and continued. "The DCS put down the initial layer of nanites to repair the interface layer, so we can fit a replacement breastplate tomorrow. We're going to have to scavenge the Type-A Prototype armour to repair some parts, but the Type-A and the Type-B are fairly similar in most regards. The difference only really lies internally, rather than in the nature of the armour. We would formally like to put in a request for extra funding in the next report to the Representative, though, as we've almost depleted our reserve of spares compatible with Unit 00."

The meeting was interrupted by Lieutenant Aoba arriving, late. His apologies for oversleeping were brushed aside, as the discussion continued.

"That's already in motion," replied Ritsuko, to the final point. "After the performance of the two Evas against the latest Herald, and the recommendation of TFV, they're taken Unit 02 over to Chicago, for a 'full independent analysis'," her tongue curled with sarcasm over the last phrase, "by NEG military staff for expansion of the project."

Misato frowned. "What's your objection to that?" she asked. "Surely a budget increase is worth a bit of poking. Although, I have to say," she added, "it doesn't really make much sense to take the one certainly battle fit Eva away from both the Eastern Front. I'd heard that Asuka was being transferred here instead, after the damage that we took last time. Actually, come to think of it, it's obvious. She's the one in the first MP Eva, of course. That's the one they'd want to look at."

"No, it's not obvious, and I'll tell you why," stated Dr Akagi, contempt in her voice, as her lips turned up in a sneer. "Doctor Miyakame and a bunch of the high-ranking members of the Engel Project are going to be some of the people doing the 'poking', as you put it so well. They're not exactly neutral. In fact, they're out to ruin us and take over the Project, assimilating it into the Engel Project!"

There was an embarrassed silence around the table, as Ritsuko seemed on the verge of going on another of her rants about the Engel Project and her belief that they were trying to ruin the Evas. Misato gritted her teeth.

_I will not say "So what?". It is not good for Rits' sanity. I will not say "So what", even though I can't see any problems with letting another NEG project look at the Evas._

One of the Nazzadi sitting around the table cleared his throat. As a vat-Nazzadi, created from Asian gene-stock, he was biologically 48. He looked older. His hair was almost completely white, the traces of the original jet black almost completely overwhelmed, and wrinkle lines drew a topographical map on his face. The Migou had been through into their construction of a fake genetic population, and one of those parts was the fact that some people draw a bad genetic hand in life. But then again, Chief Engineer Timana seemed good at drawing bad hands. He'd lost his wife, a fellow Ashcroft arcanotechnician, shortly after the birth of their second child, a daughter, in an accident that had taken out an entire building of staff, her body never found like so many of the others. He'd taken it badly, the presence of his children all that really kept him sane. Now his daughter was in an Ashcroft Clinic as a long-term patient, and his weekly psychological evaluations were showing high levels of both mundane stress and Aeon War Syndrome markers. He was being flagged as being only a few steps away from a complete breakdown; if another thing happened to him, it was suspected that those suicidal thoughts that emerged after the accident would return.

He was one of the older ones involved in the project, Misato knew, one of the arcanotechnicians from the first team. Indeed, he'd known and worked with Dr Miyakame then, along with all the other figures who loomed, metaphorically, over the modern staff on the Evangelion Project. This may have partly been behind the hints of annoyance she could see on his face.

"My apologies, Dr Akagi, but this meeting has a deadline, and I still need to report on Unit 01."

Ritsuko blinked heavily, and took a deep breath. "I'm sorry. Go ahead, Timana."

The arcanotechnician in charge of the team assigned specifically to the Evangelion that Shinji piloted bought up an enlarged image.

"To put it simply," he began, "we're out of parts for Unit 01, and even if we had them, we'd need to wait for the organism under the armour to recover from the replacement parts. We haven't even been able to graft the replacement flesh to the chest, to repair the chest wound that Zero-One received from the AT-Beam that Mot used."

Misato cocked her head curiously. "Why not?"

The engineer grimaced. "The organism is furious and in pain, to put it simply. We can't remove the restraint armour to perform the operation, because it'll run rampant if we don't keep it locked down. We're having to carefully balance the growth-and-immunosuppressants we give it with the need to get it repaired. We've removed most of the more delicate components and we're letting the organism regenerate on its own, slowly. Once it repairs that, we can fix the mechanical parts. But at the moment, it's completely useless for combat..."

"Well," began Ritsuko, only to be interrupted.

"... which brings me neatly to my second point," continued Timana, brushing a loose strand of wiry hair back. "We're out of parts for Unit 01 completely. It never had a full set of Type-A armour, because the original team had us change part way through its construction, and we've exhausted all the stocks of Type-B. The organic material from Asherah... well, that black oily stuff contaminated the first set completely; it had even begun breaking down the armour, and the ceramic compound is treated to be as unreactive as possible." His voice became softer. "It was the same with the arcology dome where it died."

"As for the set which was coated by the activities of the Third Child in killing the Kathirat, it had appeared to be in good condition, once we decontaminated it and removed the highly carcinogenic ichor." His face screwed up into disgust. "And then we got abiogenesis. Yes. We got _harangoy_ abiogenesis in Unit 01's armour. First time we found some single celled prokaryotes inside a hairline crack in the armour, we just thought that there had been a breach of hygiene in the factory. When we got the mandatory H&S testing back from Bio, the next day, it turned out that it was completely unrelated to any other form of terrestrial or encountered-Migou life. We ran another scan, and there were already eukaryotic lifeforms worming their way through the armour, adapted to that environment. The three staff that ran the tests are on compassionate leave at the moment from what they found when we cracked open the shoulderblades, and may I also point out that all the damage that Unit 01 keeps on suffering means that we're all... the entire team is suffering from elevated AWS, even by arcanotechnician standards. That armour's with Bio now, being studied by a arcanoxenobiology group."

He shook his head. "Please, can someone stop the Third Child from taking so much damage and getting covered in the blood-substitute of these creatures? Each one has some hideous bioarcanochemical trick hidden in it which has some effect on the armour, and forces us to replace it all. And I don't even want to consider what the effects on the Evangelion organisms are. They're somewhat tetratamutable, and we don't want the Evangelions replicating the AWS-inducing properties even with the armour on."

The scientists and engineers around the table were all slightly wincing as they heard in depth what the engineers on Unit 01 were having to deal with.

"So, what you're saying," asked Ritsuko after that report, "is that Zero One is completely out of operation at the moment."

"Correct."

He had been prepared to propose that they ask for help from the Engel Project, but the irrationality of Ritsuko had already made it clear what the response to such a proposal would have been. There was something about the name "Dr Akagi", he suspected from first hand experience, that just drove people mad. But there was the generation divide in the Evangelion Project. The theoreticians and the higher up staff were young. Many of them had been in university when the technical staff had been building the damn thing, and the rest had been even younger. They hadn't seen the brilliance of the original team, and complained all the time about so-called design flaws in the Evas.

"And that we're out of spare parts for it."

"Correct."

"And we won't be getting replacements until..."

"Six days for more Type-B equipment." Timana sucked air in through his teeth. "It's almost not worth fitting the armour; ETA for the Type-C is about a fortnight from now. It's only a slight iterative improvement, bringing the older two Evangelions up to about the standards of Unit 02, but it'll make it easier to fit and means that we can do a better job on the repairs."

"That's an idea, actually," added Maya.

Misato tapped her fingers on the table. "No," she said after a while. "We want to minimise the risk from the period of time that we only have one Eva available here. When the NEG return Unit 02 to us, we can run a full refit cycle. We were only able to kill Mot with the use of two Units. Had Rei been unavailable, Shinji would have been vaporised by that first shot, or when the _Academia_ overheated." She winced. "You wouldn't believe the paperwork that commandeering a partially complete ship, tearing off its armour for uses as a shield (which then gets destroyed), making massive systematic changes to it to handle..." she took a deep breath, "...the entire output of an arcology and then melting the main gun, causes."

Ritsuko frowned at her. "Yes. Yes I can. It's kind of obvious, you know, and a very silly thing to say. You wrecked a half-a-billion terranote ship. That produces paperwork."

The black haired woman sighed. "Joke, Rits, joke. Unless you're willing to reprogram the Magi to deal with it..."

"Experimental bioelectronic super-computers that mix the raw computing power of hardware with the specialised pattern-recognition skills of wetware optimised by genetic algorithms are not be used for paperwork," stated Maya, firmly.

"That's right. It's on the list," added Makota.

"There's a list?" asked Misato. This development seemed interesting.

Makota coughed guiltily. "'The Things That the Technicians Are Not Allowed to Do with the Magi' list," he said, blushing slightly. "It's just a joke list that we have in Central, an in-joke with us. We haven't actually tried any of the things on the list. Really. Well, some of them, but it's sort of split between jokes, like that and not trying to teach them sorcery, and things like GOTO functions and remembering to use the appropriate space-time model when analysing data."

"But the paperwork restriction is there?"

"Yes. They're meant to be completely isolated from the outside world, to prevent violation of such a sensitive project. Any data input has to be approved by external sources, and the code analysed on a virtual computer, due to the damage that could be done to the organic parts by bad code. To summarise, they're there for big things, like resolving the nightmare of how to get a walking giant biped, not for paperwork," answered Maya, in a manner most final.

~'/|\'~

It was really unfair, Shinji though, that they had needed to attend normal lessons in the morning when the parent-teacher meetings were in the afternoon.

_Sorry, _guardian_-teacher meetings._

In a world such as Earth during the Aeon War, and especially in a school where so many of the parents have such hazardous professions, vocabulary and language must adapt to the situation.

But the conference was still a little distance in the future, and thus the inevitable questions that would be raised about his dropping marks. Because, of course, having training four out of seven days a week, and a PsychEval on the fifth day was not a sufficient excuse, at least for Misato. Actually, it was quite disappointing for Shinji too; he'd always managed to stay in the top half of the year, but had dropped down to the third percentile.

Slightly annoyingly, Rei didn't seem to have any problems staying near the top of the year, despite the fact that she seemed to be training every single night. She didn't seem to even work for it; she either knew something or did not, and the latter was far more common. Actually, the things that she knew could sometimes be quite worrying. If made to answer in class, she would give a near-perfect technical answer, in which would be mixed facts which were far beyond their level. Like, in questions on the "First Strike Hypothesis", exact casualty figures. That wouldn't have been a problem, were it not for the fact that exact figures were not actually available, lost in the chaos caused by the start of the Second Arcanotech War and Migou strikes against China, and any hope of recovering them buried by the Rapine Storm.

Yes, Shinji had been thinking about Rei a lot after the events on the 30th of September, 8 days ago. Once they'd released him from the full debrief and treatment of the sympathetic burns at the Ashcroft Clinic (which had taken up all of Monday), he had returned to school with a different view of her. She was very intelligent, almost suicidally brave (although was it bravery, or apathy?) and, yes, it must be said, rather attractive.

Currently, he was sitting in the lunch hall, trying to divert his attention between eating, gazing at her in a way that he had convinced himself was not creepy, and Toja and Ken (who were quite aware of the fact that he was interested in Rei, although they used the term "interested" in the special way that double-entendres that only have one meaning possess).

"So... Shinji," began Ken, slowly and deliberately, "how are you going to manage it in a forty metre giant Engel?"

He frowned. "Manage what? And it's an Evangelion, not a..." _Damn! He was turning into Dr Akagi!_ "Forget it. Manage what?"

The bespectacled boy's face broke out into a wide grin. "Your epic seduction of Rei, of course. Will you climb up the Dome Spire with her in your hand, being attacked by planes?"

There was a brief pause, as all three boys considered the worrying attractiveness of that image.

"Or perhaps you will give her a bunch of redwood trees?" added Toja, joining in the fun.

Shinji tried to lighten the situation through humour. "She has her own Eva. She can go pick her own trees, not force me to do it. Whatever happened to gender equality?"

"So you do admit it," declared Toja the Inquisitor, red eyes glinting in triumph.

The triumph was somewhat ruined by a eighth of a cucumber, thrown rather accurately down the neck of his loose shirt. The black-skinned boy began to squirm as the cold, wet vegetable presed against his shirt.

"Nice shot," said Ken, admiringly.

There were twenty other _sidoci_ in the entire school, a massively disproportionate number even when the higher number of inter-subspecies marriages were taken into account. This was a sign of Ashcroft's inclusive policies on the peculiar children of humans and Nazzadi. Many were taken into care at a young age, as the parent found themselves incapable of dealing with the constant surveillance from the NEG, along with an infant that didn't connect to them properly, and, perhaps more importantly, was parapsychic from the cradle. The Ashcroft Foundation would pay for them to attend the best schools, the altruism a thinly veiled investment in their future value. They either, depending on personal preference, sat with their classmates, the parapsychics group, or the xenomixes. The parapsychic lot were particularly obnoxious, older than their years as a consequence of the responsibilities of their powers, and possessed of an almost boundless egotism and thinly veiled disdain for "Mundanes". That was not to say that all parapsychics were like that, of course, but the ones who made it into the defining characteristic of their personality, discussing feverishly their "power levels", were, at least to the people they believed to be their inferiors, thoroughly unlikable people.

But Rei sat on her own in a corner of the room, wolfing down the protein supplement and leaving the energy-rich soup that she had ordered. There was an invisible bubble around her, which no-one seemed to want to enter. Even a cleaner, the bulk around his shoulders and under his loose clothing giving the truth about his role in the school, avoided the cordon of exclusion around her. She sat alone, a pale flower on barren snow. She looked up from her meal in time to see Toja move to whack Shinji in the head with a piece of bread. But as his hand descended, he pulled it back, pulling the blow, as he flinched subtly.

Of course, momentum is a bitch, and the top half of the baguette broke off, bouncing off Shinji's skull and landing on the floor. The cleaner straightened up, and Rei saw his hand move towards his waist. He relaxed, as the bread turned out to not be a cunningly disguised hyper-edged blade. The normal proceeds of school life returned with a rush that was imperceptible to all but the most focussed observer.

Such a return naturally involved Hikary dragging Toja away by the ear for a little talk, on the necessity of not acting like an idiot, not that he was even capable of such a challenge, and other such riffs upon a common theme. And Rei saw the small smile on her face that appeared when she was not exposing him to a glare with roughly the wattage of the main gun on the _Ashcroft_.

She really wondered how the rest of the world was so unobservant. How could they not see the obvious?

Shinji and Ken got rapidly tired of the spectacle of Toja being scolded. It wasn't that it wasn't hilarious (for it was), it was that familiarity breeds contempt, and the sight was a rather common one.

Shinji just hoped that Hikary wouldn't find out about the cucumber.

"So, what exactly happens on these GT conferences, then?" he asked Ken.

"GT?"

"Guardian-teacher. I can't be bothered to say it every time."

The bespectacled boy shrugged. "Fair enough. I kind of forgot that you haven't been to one before. There's a boring speech from some guest visitor every year in the main hall, then we get set loose to meet with our guardian and then we show up to the pre-appointed time, in which we get told that we're doing very well in the proper subjects, but need to work more on the humanities and try associating more with our classmates and possibly get involved in the school sports teams, honestly, it'll be good for him." Ken adjusted his glasses. "That may be just me, though. My dad is rather sick of the speech, too."

"Your dad?" Shinji asked, mildly curious.

"Yeah, you won't have met him. He's in Armourcorp, as one of their higher ups. He's overseeing one of the Powered Armour groups contracted with the NEG." The pride could be heard in the boy's voice. "Powered Armour is awesome. A Mk-10A Centurion could take down any twentieth century tank you care to name, and it's all crewed by a single man. It's airdroppable, has DCS systems that restore 2.91 functional kg/s, and Charge Beams are just amazing. Fire one, and they just go and they won't stop until they hit something hardened to military standards. Relativistic proton beams... just wow."

Shinji winced as the memory of the Evangelion-scale Charge Beam doing nothing to the black shape of Mot arose from his mind. It bought with it the pain that had followed so soon. His hands suddenly felt very cold and smooth in his lap, and the room seemed to spin.

He shook his head and focussed, bringing the world back into shape. It took time, the people at the Ashcroft Clinic had said, for the trauma to be unravelled; certainly more than a week. He meant to ask Ken something, but he had forgotten.

Just then, a loud noise could be heard from outside the window that ran along one of the long sides of the room. In a fundamental human instinct that so often, in the Aeon War, played against the species, a large proportion of the room flocked over and stared. Shinji and Ken were among them.

What looked like a full armoured convoy had emerged through the gates. Multiple Broadswords tore holes in the lawns,while Gladii and Sabres took up the flanks, even as powered armour flocked around the larger bipeds like children. Down the middle rolled a moving glimmer, which became, as they moved to a stop in front of the school, six Ranger IFVs, as they turned off their stealth fields.

Shinji turned to Ken with a confused look on his face, who was keeping his video camera active, rolling from vehicle to vehicle, to take in as much as possible.

"I love GT Conferences," the boy said happily in response. "Oooh! Oooh! The new MV-16A-B3 model of the Gladius! Look at the modified lenses; they're meant to give an improved optical resolution and give autonomous control of a sensor to the LAI, allowing better target tracking!"

"What's happening?" Shinji shouted into Ken's ear, over the noise.

"The parents. See, every one who gets in this way is a High Value Target, and so there's enough of them that this becomes one of the most guarded places in London-2. My dad'll be coming later, in a normal car."

The ramps to the APCs opened, and a flock of quite ordinary looking people, dressed in work clothing entered the school building without ceremony.

Naturally, Misato, emerging from the fifth Ranger, would not go so quietly. Although she was wearing a proper suit (although Shinji, personally, felt that the skirt was too short), she had decided to, for whatever reason, open the top of the shirt. This had the side effect of giving Ken a target, and the focus of the camera moved to straight down the blouse.

Evidentially, she could feel the presence of the eyes upon her. Either that, or she could hear the wolf whistles, which were probably more of a give-away, now that Shinji thought about it. She gave the floors of slathering, mostly male students a V-sign. Had human biology worked that way, there would have been explosive nasal haemorrhages. It was perhaps fortunate for the onlookers, not to mention the suspiciously fit and bulky cleaning staff, that it did not.

Shinji sighed.

"Man, Misato's really hot," declared Ken, camera still trained. "And she's the Director of Operations in one of the Ashcroft Projects, too! That's even hotter. I like a woman with..."

"How do you know that?" asked Shinji, somewhat sharply. "That's classified."

"Yeah, but it's a pretty open secret on military forums. The project went public today with a display in Chicago."

"Wait. What?" Shinji paused. "What?"

"Big red thing. Awesome. They're keeping the ID of the pilot secret, but I know it wasn't you, because it was filmed when I was watching you fail to write a fairy tale," pointed out Ken.

"Not important right now." Shinji shook his head. "They went public and they didn't tell me that people know? About them?"

Ken shrugged, putting down his camera as Misato went inside. The crowd dissipated, with the exception of the tech-heads who were still admiring the military hardware standing sentinel on the once-pristine lawns.

And so it was that Shinji was one of the few who noticed the sealed car decloak, after all the other parents and guardians had gone inside. It was mat black, and frankly looked like it was violating the speed limit just by existing; more akin to a low-flying aircraft than a car. Of course, that was also true of any vehicle which Misato was allowed behind the wheel, but not by design or the intention of the arcane engineers who had designed the locomotion.

A sole figure got out of the car, dressed all in black, and wearing his customary glasses. Even from this distance, Shinji could recognise his father.

He suddenly knew who the guest speaker would be this year. It wasn't as if the bastard was going to his Parent-Teacher Conference.

A movement of white in the corner of his eye caught his attention. He looked over, to see Rei waving down, slowly and solemnly, each movement of her hand a precise tick of some unseen metronome. She was smiling slightly, her face unusually animated by her standards.

Shinji looked down to see his father wave back up at Rei, ignoring his biological son completely. He felt rage well up in his stomach, fourteen years of suppressed anger at those horrible memories that he didn't think about from the second worst day of his life, immediately after the worst.

_Who the _hell _did she think she was! And he certainly doesn't think that he's my father, I've known that for a long time!_

~'/|\'~

It was always late evening in the St James Plaza.

One of the side effects of arcology life was a subtle disconnection from the normal circadian rhythms of the natural world. This disconnection became a sudden dislocation when certain themed districts, mostly in the commercial centres, had a fixed time of day. Perhaps unsurprisingly, one of the most common of these fixed times was the late evening, about 7pm, with the weather typically that of a warm summer.

The St James Plaza was unusual in that it was reserved for active members of the internal security forces of the NEG. In the line of duty, many of them were exposed to things both mundane and extra-dimensional that left them with a pronounced urge to get drunk; hence the Plaza existed as a place for them to blow off steam while still monitoring them. The bars were staffed with people with psychological training, and a duty to report to the official counselling services. People always loosened up when inebriated; this way it helped maintain their sanity and prevented them from blabbing anything that should not be public. There was also the role of stopping the agents from doing harm to themselves from excess consumption of any of the large array of legalised pharmaceuticals available in the New Earth Government. The drug laws in the NEG were liberal; it had been found that it kept the populace happier (and that was all so vital in these dark days), and moreover the income from taxation was most useful. However, there was still the risk of excess.

Outside, in the warm, still air, crickets chirruped. Mixed in among these live animals were centrally controlled sentry drones, their networked cameras monitoring the area. The neon lights on the buildings cast a strange light on the cobbles, still slightly wet from the brief, cooling rain that had fallen three hours ago. There were tables set up outside, the Mediterranean feel incongruous with the steel, glass and velvet of the buildings that loomed over them. A buzz of conversation reverberated between the artificial canyons, echoes distorting and altering until the world seemed filled with the sussuration of human voice.

Inside the one of the bars, whose sign proclaimed that it was called "Deus ex Euphoria", Mala, an FSB agent attached to the Counter-terrorism Department (CTD) was nursing his second drink, staring morosely into the blue-green liquid. Over on the other side of the bar, his duty partner, Akiry, was chatting to two men, her dyed green hair shining under the light.

They weren't talking to each other. You didn't after this kind of case. You went out and found something to distract yourself with, until the proper shrinks could schedule a meeting for you. They really should have done so by now, but they were still dealing with whatever had happened at the end of last month which had caused breakdowns in a quarter of the parapsychic FSB agents, and so the more mundane cases were being slowed.

_Mundane! Hah!_

Mala got drunk, then high, then drunk again. That was how he coped with it. Akiry found some men and shut off her brain for a while. That was how she coped with it. Though it wasn't really coping. It was just delaying the problem for later, they both knew.

But the thing was, later wasn't now. Later meant that you didn't have to have the horrible roiling feeling of guilt, shame and failure brewing in your gut, noxious fumes burning your throat and leaking into your mind _right now_.

The bartender leaned across the counter, and tapped him on the hand.

"Do you want to talk about it, Mala?"

The Nazzadi snorted. "What makes you think I have anything to talk about," he growled, taking another mouthful of the drink.

"Your PCPU tells me that you're on enforced leave, and, frankly, I don't see people in here at," the barman said, as he checked the clock in the bar, "11 am drinking as you are unless something's happened."

He let the words hang in the air, idly polishing a glass. You had to let clients proceed at their own speed, rather than pushing them too hard and ending up with silence.

~'/|\'~

Asuka smiled broadly as Minister Aristide herself, the Minister of War for the whole NEG, presented her with the single gold bar of a Second Lieutenant. After her success against the Migou fleet, they had made an almost unique exception for her. Just for her. Alone.

It may have been true that the official commission, rather than just the derogatory title of 'Test Pilot', wouldn't change anything for her. She would still be outside the formal chain of command, under the auspices of the Evangelion Project rather than the New Earth Army. Some might say that they had just given it to her to placate her, and then bound her up in regulations so that it didn't mean anything. That didn't matter. She had won it fair and square, over five years before most people. It meant she was better than them.

If they'd deployed her to the front lines before, she could have won it earlier.

And it meant that she outranked the other Evangelion pilots. That was good; it put her as the only logical leader of the team. The First and the Third had worked well together in the censored video she had seen, against the most recent Herald, although there were quite a few flaws in their training. The First Child had certainly improved, to be able to handle her cumbersome, inferior war machine in that fashion. It was just as well. Incompetent subordinates reflected poorly on their leader.

She saluted the military leaders present. There weren't any mass-media cameras in attendance, which she thought was a bit of a pity; she was the youngest officer in the NEG military, and this should be a record. At least they had broadcast the images of her in Unit 02, demonstrating the superior abilities of her precious weapon to the onlookers. The Evangelion Project had gone public, a sudden declaration that she had only been informed about shortly before getting into the Entry Plug. But the tension had been good for her, she knew; the technical staff from Berlin had congratulated her on her highest sustained synchronisation ratio yet.

She turned, and saluted the audience, packed with high ranking members of the military and important scientists. She knew she looked wonderful, too. She was wearing the deep green dress uniform of the military, which fit her perfectly, tailored as it was and produced to order. She particularly liked the way it emphasised her figure, curving in and out at the right places. Her skin and hair all looked perfectly natural. Perfectly natural.

She hoped that Kaji liked it.

Ryoji Kaji was paying very little attention to the ceremony before him. He was considerably more busy worrying about the buy-in that he knew that the Representative of Ashcroft Europe needed. He was worried about the fact that he was going to have to steal something from the Auburn Storage Facility, that ultrasecret location where some of the most dangerous artefacts, phenomena and creatures captured by the NEG and the OIS were stored. He was worried by the fact that the stress was getting to him, nightmares of running down endless hospital corridors filling his sleep since he arrived in Chicago, doors and walls bloodied and shifting, like the Segumé incident, one of his first missions. He was worried by a horrible gut feeling that this was the wrong thing to be doing, that it would be safer for everyone to just leave the Shard in the storage facility.

But he had to. It was necessary to find the truth behind this network of conspiracies. He had linked the hints that Pax had given him to detailed analysis of that data he had about Project Herkunft and its front companies. It was all connected somehow, he knew. Ashcroft's parapsychic research project was linked to Project Evangelion; they had been the ones who had found the Children, the few people who could pilot the synthorgs. Yet only one of them was directly parapsychic, and it was a consequence of her subspecies.

_Whites only seem to exist to muck up data_, he thought, only half in jest.

It was frustrating. It was like being led around by the nose by some cosmic sadist, some being beyond his comprehension who took joy in only giving out the least information possible, just enough that you could, were you able to think like it in its ineffability, solve the demented puzzles that it placed before you. Everything was so obscured nowadays. There were the hints of hordes of people-who-could-become-monsters, and monsters-that-could-appear-like-people fighting in the Occult Underground, there were coded references to "fear", "origin" and "notion". There was the obsession in the military with meaningful naming schemes; there were the Engels, named after types of Angel. There were their ancestors, the Evangelions, which followed the same scheme. There was the Sword-class mecha, and the Trooper-class Power Armour, built by Armourcorp. There was the running theme of transition and change in the logos of Chrysalis subsidiaries, and butterflies everywhere. The veiled references, the allusions; it was some code that he lacked the key to.

And with that, as the audience applauded, and he absent-mindedly joined in, he realised that he had made up his mind. There was something rotten at the heart of human society, its tentacles spread through so much of the NEG. Buried deep underground, guarded by a shell of lies and deceit, it would be hard to find. But he would break it, or die trying.

Now, all he had to do was get through the next week, until the unveiling of the Daeva-Class Araska on Saturday, without Asuka doing anything that would embarrass herself and him. She was getting worryingly assertive. The Third Child was going to be attending the unveiling on Saturday; perhaps he could get her interested in this Shinji...

It would be healthier in the long run for her, after all.

~'/|\'~

Gendo sat back in his office, making sure that the lights had been set to maximum. Even unsealing this archive bore risks, with the ever-potent threat of the Old One, Gurathanka, hidden within shadows and watching. Of course, that being, paradoxically puissant and yet rendered stupid by its power and hunger, could not watch the entire world at once, but were he to be found by that hideous monster, then terrible things could happen.

Quite beyond him being devoured and his soul tortured until the Great Old One grew bored.

The room was isolated from all external data sources. The computers were operating on a sealed, physically isolated network, lacking any wireless communications that might give them away. The wards were still holding, preventing eavesdropping mundane or arcane. No Outsider could enter this room without massive pain and alarms triggering, so thick were the arcane barriers.

_Yes, it was safe._

The metamorphic material of his desk unfolded, as the archives were displayed to be read. Here, he had some of the most comprehensive data on the history of the universe. Texts from throughout history were stored here. The Dyer Papers, with his photos from the doomed Miskatonic expedition were here, along with the attendant Danforth Notes, the collected ravings of his companion. That Cyclopean city that they had explored and detailed was now destroyed, and these notes could have done harm far out of proportion of what the author, so feverish in his desire to protect humanity from the extra-dimensional, could have known. Those notes had been what had lead the Chrysalis Corporation to that obsidian city, and what had permitted them to find the texts from which they had almost constructed the Rite of Sacred Union.

Gendo's lip curled, as he thought of the damage that could have done to the world. Yet a by-product of those texts would also be the saviour.

Those papers were not alone, of course. The Thurston Papers were there, along with images of the Wilcox sculptures, that spoke of and showed that which the Migou feared so much. A copy of the Armitage Archive was here, cross referenced to those things that the misshapen spawn of one of the Outer Gods had been researching. The old man had promised his fellows to destroy this, but he had found himself incapable of doing so. The papers had been found by the OIS in the Miskatonic archives, and taken into safe storage. They had gone missing twenty years later, when an operative of the Eldritch Society had heard of them.

_Oh, Miskatonic. Mistaktonic. Paranoid, perilous Miskatonic. How was that one small, insignificant university in Massachusetts has been the source of so much of the modern world? The Ta'ge Texts were found because of an expedition to Antartica funded by that university, over a century earlier. The Armitage Archive has proven itself so very, very useful in my aims. The West Formula has an entire Ashcroft Project dedicated to reconstructing it from the doctor's expense claims. _The Mysteries Within _found its way there for Teresa Ashcroft to find, and create arcane theory from._

_The closer we get to the celestial concordance, the more and more worried I become that this is just a ploy by the Crawling Chaos, towards some unknown aim. But I chose my path, twelve years ago, and I must walk it_

The texts contained within were not all the by-product of the voracious hoarding of data that the Miskatonic archivist practised, of course. The data archives of the Stellar Eradicators, the Slan(t)ers, and the Tangency Network were there, early 21st century groups that had someone got their hands on a surprising insight into the nature of the universe. _The Tales of the Black Freighter_, with its details of a Caribbean manifestation of a Cthulhu-worshipping cult independent of the Esoteric Order of Dagon, was there as a historical note, its popularity as a comic book a sign of the ways that the dreams of that squamous god could leak into the zeitgeist. He had texts and even a single device that belonged to the alien and unknowable Tsab, that strange, seemingly matriarchal species that interfered but rarely with lesser beings, but displayed apocalyptic firepower from the least of their agents; single individuals with weapons akin to a Victory-class Battlecruiser, who mind-controlled those who they defeated into servitude. Most shockingly of all, Gendo had managed to obtain the full product of that unknowing seer, Nagura Tanigawa, even though the predecessors of the OIS had destroyed all traces of it from the legitimate datasphere. That, hidden in a commercial product, had been such an explanation of the relationship between mad, blind Azathoth and its soul, Nyarlothotep, still amazed the Representative of the Ashcroft Foundation.

It was superior to the explanation provided by the _Necronomicon_. Though that text was feared above all by the NEG, Gendo knew the true source of the fear.

AHNUNG.

Gendo knew why they feared it; in between the inaccuracies introduced by a mad Arab who could not really understand what he saw through the gaps in the fourth dimension which he peered, there was sometimes quite shocking accuracy. Almost as good as the prophecies of Nitt Prophecies at times, but the later only existed in fragments, and about nine-tenths of the time seemed to be designed to be misinterpreted, in a way that only became obvious after the event. And so they spread around the myth that merely reading the Necronomicon could drive a man mad, that it was fundamentally inimical to sanity. That was a lie. Compared to many texts, the Necronomicon was safe. There had even been a fad among academics one hundred and fifty years ago, or so it seemed sometimes, to have read it. Almost all copies contained no actual occult rituals, and there was a good case that the copies that did were often later additions, to such a useful primer on history. Uniformly, it was fairly good with its history, but bad when it came to the future.

He ran his fingers down the spine of his copy, flipping it open. He knew that it would be on the right page, and, as his eyes scanned down the page, it was;

_Nor is it to be thought_ (he read) _that man is either the oldest or the last of earth's masters, or that the common bulk of life and substance walks alone. The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be._

That pair of sentences embodied the flaws of the Necronomicon. The former was true, although vague and fed through the misunderstandings of a primitive, unfamiliar with the scientific mindset. That was a fundamental flaw; it was a scientific mindset that would save humanity, not blind faith. The latter sentence, meanwhile, was as demonstrably as false as Cake's hypothesis on the nature of existence.

Gendo, smiled, as he pulled out an item from the Nagura Tanigawa file, transcribed from its original DVD to modern data storage devices. He knew that the man from the GIA would be obtaining the fragment of the First Herald from the Auburn storage facility. As he hit the play button, he thought that that man was one of maybe three individuals who could safely obtain that fragment of the First-And-Deceased without being caught. Yet he didn't know his own value. He was a veritable infant, despite thinking himself a master of espionage.

~'/|\'~

Mala sniffed heavily, and stared down at the polished floor. He was on his fourth drink by now, and the combined effects of the alcohol and the minor mood stabilisers which had been added to the third drink onwards, to partially negated the effects of the alcohol were letting him relax. In such government run facilities, the staff were licensed to perform such involuntary medication under the Personal Competency Compliance and Public Prevention of Mental Disorder clauses, in Public Health Act, 2067, which permitted the administering of approved categories of drugs to any member of the public by an authorised individual.

"First major incident after being moved back off stake-out, and this had to happen. Just _lolasy_, Neil. _Foweda haysti yavob sasily_..." His voice tailed away.

Neil knew Mala, and the he knew just enough Nazzadi to understand swearing swear. He was probably about ready now, Neil thought, and mentally switched to "Counselling Mode" in his brain, his body posture subtly shifting. He also flicked on the recorder, so that the details of this conversation could be passed to the proper FSB psychiatric staff.

"We were hitting the Bountyists. The Church of Gaia's Bounty? Their public line is that the Earth Mother watches over all of us, giving all life the vitality it needs, and so we should respect nature, and give it due respect. Standard hippy bullshit. Standard cult concealment stuff. I swear, we should just ban all religion; every single fucking belief in a higher power or sky pixies just gets used as a way for fucking cultists to control people. From this pagan stuff to the damn belief that we need to fight against some space tyrant who killed people with volcanoes; they're all cults worshipping extra-dimensional creatures."

The barman listened to the man's inebriated rant for a while, still unnecessarily polishing a glass, then, as the diatribe died down, cocked his head, and asked;

"So, what did you see?"

The Nazzadi shuddered. "I was on back-up, along with Akiry, as the infantry while the PA boys hit the building from all sides. Standard formation; two of those tin cans working together. Pretty much nothing on foot that can survive when a pair of _Baraki_ or Flame-Crusaders run through a wall. Even if you're stupid enough to fire an RPG inside and actually hit one, the other'll get you. They go in. Nothing. We get the call in, to cuff the people found." His red eyes were hollow, staring through the mirror behind the bar, as if he knew that there was a monitor behind the two way mirror.

"The place was grim. And dark. There were skulls everywhere, and spikes everywhere. Most of the skulls had rotted away to just bare bone, but a few were fresh. Some of the skulls had spikes on them. Some more skulls were on those spikes. How the hell had they managed to kill so many? We hadn't had any elevated disappearance rates, and they can't have been smuggling that many past ArcSec. And everywhere... there was these Roman numerals." His finger traced them, almost unconsciously, in spilt drink on the table. "XV. Carved into everything; skulls, furniture, the floor, the ceiling. Fifteen. And there were slogans on all the walls. 'Send down your love!' 'Hurray, Hurray, it's a Happy Day! 'The Sky Smiles' 'Love is All We Need.' All these happy, cheerful phrases." He shuddered. "This was in the private bits, of course. The public bits, and the false private bits were what you might expect; built out of false wood, symbols from the OIS-approved list of religious iconography, plants, you know, the works." He emptied his glass. "Give me another one."

Neil turned over the nanofactory, and ordered a new _farayuti_, a Nazzadi drink from their fictional homeworld. Judging from the black-skinned man's level of inebriation, he couldn't take much more. The alcoholic content was thus duly dialled down, to near zero.

The bartender passed it over to Mala. "Here you go. On the house."

"Thanks, man." He downed a third of it on one go. "We get down to the basement, following the instructions from the PA boys. I probably shouldn't call them that; they were both girls this time, but frankly I don't care. They'd dug a sort of crude cavern into the arcology superstructure. No clue how the hell they'd done it. You'd need all sorts of mining tools to be able to, and it'll surely be noticed. All these people in cages around this statue thing." His hands began to shake. "It was... it was like some kind of bird thing, but far... far too many wings. The angels... angles were wrong. They'd made it of almost completely clear stuff. Diamond, maybe, although they obviously couldn't have made it in an authorised nanofac. All the lights, too. All the lights were centred on it, bright spotlights."

He gulped, deeply. "It was at the same time weirdly beautiful and absolutely horrible. You could only see the rest of the room by the light that it sent bouncing around the room. And there was blood pooled around the claws. No skulls in here, though. It was weird. You'd think that a cult would have all their sacrifices made into a skull throne or something by their altar. All around it, though, people in cages. Filthy cages. A good thirty of them. And still no sign of the cultists."

"I haven't seen you affected like this before," Neil said, a faint furrow of worry in his brow. "You were involved in the raids on the Fabrimortife, and that was a worse case."

Mala sighed heavily. "It's not the building. You can only see the inside of the human body used as decoration so much before you just stop caring. But that statue... it was wrong. And then... well, as we starting letting the captives loose, one by one, cuffing them ready for extraction to a secure facility, none of them took their eyes off the damn thing. They were covered in whip marks, everywhere. We found some links of fibre-optic cable lying around, made into these really nasty whips, but they didn't even seem to be in pain. I could see the spines poking out the backs of some of them, but all they did was stare at that damned statue."

Mala sunk his face into his hands. "Some of them tried to fight us when they realised that we were taking them away from it. They actually tried to fight us when we were trying to take them away from the whipping and the cages. We had to zap a few as they went for us. We were in full armour and they were all injured and malnourished, and they went for us." A burbling sob left his lips. "Two died from the shocks we had to use to control them. I killed a man who was too weak to survive a stun baton, and so he just died. Heart stopped. And then when Akiry and me and the rest of the FSB had extracted them, the OIS showed up. They disappeared everyone we'd released."

He shook his head. "They're never going to be seen again. They'll be declared non-human, and they won't pass the OIS sanity checks to be given back their rights. Fucking spooks and their disdain for rule of law. You shouldn't be able to declare someone non-human when they're just horribly traumatised from being taken captive by a bunch of sick bastards and subjected to who-knows-what." His voice dropped, to a near whisper. "And that wasn't just it. I was sure I saw something, as I left the place. Like a ferret, or some kind of rat-like thing, but it wasn't like the ferrets I kept as a kid. It had these weird eyes, like jades or emeralds, and they seemed to sparkle. I shot a burst at it, but missed. We didn't find anything when we searched the area. But I saw the damn thing. And nothing like that is natural. There's some sorcerer involved with that whole thing and that's why we didn't find any cultists, and that was his familiar," he slurred. "I'm sure of it."

The barman nodded. _This was a bad case._ He was going to submit a request that counselling for everyone involved in this case was bumped up in priority.

~'/|\'~

_Nothing you can make that can't be made.  
No one you can save that can't be saved.  
Nothing you can do but you can learn how to be you in time.  
It's easy._

All you need is love.  
_All you need is love.  
All you need is love, love.  
Love is all you need._

All you need is love.  
All you need is love.  
All you need is love, love.  
Love is all you need.

Nothing you can know that isn't known.  
Nothing you can see that isn't shown.  
Nowhere you can be that isn't where you're meant to be.  
It's easy. 

The prisoner was partially vivisected, her central nervous system connected up to the machines snaking down from the ceiling. The clean white light of the room shone down upon the transparent biofoam that covered her exposed organs, metal links into her cerebral cortex and spine glinting in the cold light. Extensive arcane markings in Enochian and Tsath-yo covered the walls, methodically engraved by laser-cutters, giving them a flow and precision beyond that which the human hand could achieve. The specialised sorcery allowed a merger of the machine and the human beyond that which even modern technology could achieve. The technicians at the work station had complete control over her sensory input. With the added ability to erase their short term memory, the subject could have every response to stimuli mapped, to build a complete psychological profile which could then be used to extract every last piece of information. It was possible to restore them to their previous state, but the process was long and painful, and widely considered to be too much effort in most cases.

Such a procedure was horrifically cruel and against every fundamental human dignity.

But non-humans do not have human rights.

The agent, a female xenomix, operating the machine moved methodically down the list of stimuli. She began a test-run of fear stimuli, and switched to analysing the already gathered data even as the mound of opened flesh on the table, barely recognisable as something that had once passed for human, began to twitch, the few muscles not subverted by the neural jacks violently trying to break free. The agent ignored the motion, adjusting her neat skirt and taking another sip of the coffee by the machine.

After all, it had been a long day. Nothing much interesting.

The rounded door to the room slid open, and a blond woman walked through, dressed in a smart, greyish suit that matched her practical, page-boy styled haircut. The lapel pin marked her as an parapsychic, and one classified as "Invasive". She waved at her subordinate to sit back down.

"Stay seated, Agent Anderson. I've just come to check on the feedouts."

Inside, the grey-skinned operator was puzzled. _Since when did the Deputy-Director of the L2 Branch come down to check on a mundane Total Stimuli Evaluation and Analysis Package?_

"Uh... we're incomplete as of yet, Deputy-Director. We've just finished the A7 set, and it's starting on the F1 grouping."

"And." The word was said without any intonation that would mark it as a question.

"Well, frankly, the subject is not responding as expected. The whole Affection sequence on the TSEAP is wrong. We're getting these images and junk rhymes even in A1, which should be mapping basic primate responses. It didn't even register any of the basic arousal functions to direct neural stimuli," she looked up from the screen, "which is just... wrong." She tucked a pitch black strand of hair behind an ear. "Instead, the nucleus accumbens, the septum pellucidum and the hypothalamus seem pre-flooded with euphoria. The entire basic brain chemistry is altered."

The Deputy-Director tapped a button on the PCPU on her wrist. "Yes, another one. All the "captives" are exhibiting the classic responses of a code-Shamayim cult. We've IDed this one. Kidnap victim from an Outer London Enclave, reported missing three years ago. Turns up as a cultist. Typical modi operandi. They'd locked themselves in the cages, hoping that the FSB would just let them go after counselling and they could spread afresh. The cults are like a tree, and their roots lie in the darkness whilst their leaves wave in the sun and to those who suspect nothing they can have an attractive and pleasing appearance. You can burn away their branches, or even cut the tree to the ground, but they will grow up again even stronger and adapted to the selective pressures we impose. But if we don't eradicate them, their root grow thick and black, gnawing at the fabric of society, drawing its nourishment by leeching from us, and growing even greater and more deeply entreched.

The older woman looked pensive. "And it's happening far more than it used to. Even five years ago, the only cults you'd encounter were code-El and code-Baal. Now, we've got all these other cults showing up. And we can't allow that."

The xenomixed agent felt a slight cold feeling in her head, like icy feathers running across her scalp, and shivered.

"You understand, don't you? That's why your PsychEvals have remained so consistently strong, even as a T-Seaper."

Agent Anderson nodded. "Yes, ma'am, I do. They forfeit their humanity by choosing what they do; they sacrifice it in the deluded worship of extra-dimensional beings.

The Deputy-Director nodded, pleased, and straightened up slightly. "Agent Mary," she pronounced the name in the Nazzadi way, as the xenomix preferred, "Anderson, you are being moved to a special task force to combat this revised threat. They'll be specialising on the newer codes; we have infrastructure already in place for Baals and Els. They need more trained T-Seapers. Go report to your new assignment immediately."

Mary Anderson jerked her head towards the room beyond the glass, where the vivisected woman still twitched, as atrocities and fear calculated to produce all degrees of emotional response flooded into her brain, down the cables that connected straight to her optic nerve. The eyes were a hindrance to their work, and thus they had been removed.

"And this subject?"

"We've got all we can from them. Previous experience from code-Shamayim cultists show that the mental alterations can't be reversed, and the ones who haven't already begun the T-Seap have already been transferred to the experimental laboratory. We've got to find a way to undo the process." The woman looked over through the glass, at the machine. "Terminate the subject."

Mary moved her hands through the AR display, and in the room beyond the control centre, what was legally a bag of meat began to cool, the squirming stopping. The spiderlike arms that protruded from the floor and the ceiling removed themselves from the jacks, moving back into position for decontamination.

And Mary Anderson picked up her coffee and followed the Deputy-Director out of the room without a second thought.

~'/|\'~


	10. Chapter 8: Araska and Asuka

**Chapter 8**

Araska and Asuka

~'/|\'~

**April 22nd, 2044**

The bright light shone through the window. It was a beautiful morning. Outside, the sky was a near-perfect blue, the occasional fluffy cloud only accentuating the day, bringing a relief when it would otherwise be unseasonably hot. A faint smell of the flowers that packed the garden wafted in, a floral scent that mixed with the smell of the coffee that bubbled on the table.

A man, ethnically Caucasian and perhaps in his early thirties, sat at the table, reading the paper. The sheet of memoform display flicked as he changed pages, the words shifting on the physical object when he thumbed the button on the side. He sipped at the coffee, letting out a restrained yelp when he realised that it was too hot.

He felt a pair of arms enclose him from behind. He smiled, and put down the paper.

"She... is she finally asleep?" he whispered.

His wife pulled up a chair, and sat down, grabbing a cup of coffee. "Yes. Finally." She sighed. "Why didn't they warn us?"

He looked at her, one eyebrow raised. "They did, Alba. Babies are noisy things, and we all knew that we'd lose some sleep."

"But she was up all night," Alba said with a hint of desperation, the red rims around her eyes testament to that fact. "I can't believe that's normal. I fell asleep before she did!"

"Listen, listen," the man said, a look of concern on his face. "I know it's really bad of me to leave this to you. I work too much, honey..."

"... no, really?" replied his wife, a hint of irritation creeping into her voice. She took a mouth of coffee, swallowing the hot liquid without a sound. "No, no. Ignore that. That's just the tiredness talking."

"I know, I know," he replied, hugging her. "It's just that we're hitting the crunch time in Project Prometheus. We need to have those specialist O2 recycling plants properly sequenced, for the nISS, or the station won't be able to launch on schedule. And I'm head geneticist on our part of the team. I can't take my paternity leave. But I'll make it up to you later. I promise you that. I can take all that leave I've earned up, and we can have a proper family holiday. In fact," he said, smiling, "I signed that damn waiver for my paternity rights for Ashcroft. I think I could wrangle them into paying for a family trip up to the commercial part of the nISS. How would you like that? A holiday IN SPAAAAAAAACCCCEEEEEE!!!"

Alba giggled, then clamped her knuckles into her mouth. "Sssssh! You'll wake her."

"Sorry."

"So, yes," she continued, softly. "Anything in the news? I don't think I'm really in a state to read now." She waved her hand in front of her face. "Everything is blurry, everything is blurry, because I spent all night trying to make her go to sleep and she's a baby," she sang softly, quite evidently making up the words on the spot.

He smiled. "The Google-McDonalds-Halita merger is going ahead. It's been approved, although they haven't announced what they're calling the new conglomerate TNC. Elsewise, stuff on the tensions with China, mostly. They're still not going to consider their application for the New United Nations until they fulfil the democratic criteria."

"I don't like the way that they don't let the biggest economy in the world into the governing body," Alba said, frowning.

"It's been like that since 2015. When they reformed the UN, they said 'democracies only'. It was one of the fundamental principles of President Stimson and her predecessor; kind of the point of the New Internationalist Movement, well, that and bringing all the nations together due to the massive interdependency they'd found. They'd just lived through a global depression, after all."

"Yeah, but it sets up an unnecessarily adversarial relationship with the Chinese. They've been looking for allies against what they view as the western attempts to sideline them. After all, dear, your employer has alienated pretty much all the old energy nations..."

"... don't blame me for that! I'm a geneticist. I have nothing to do with those crazy physicists. All physicists are terminally insane. Seriously, if your work is driving you mad, I'd call that a bloody good hint that you should think again about what you're doing."

She held his hand. "Listen to me, Harlan. I don't want Alma to grow up in a world with a Second Cold War. Our parents were born towards the end of the last one. We're not them."

"But we need a proper foundation. Democracy is the only way forwards, and we don't want to be letting a nationalist police state into the NUN. I mean, we don't ever want people in the NUN dragged away because they read the wrong things, because they disagreed with the government, because they followed the wrong religion, people called "non-human" because the government doesn't approve of them."

"I'm not disagreeing with you, Harlan...", his wife began.

"Yes, you are," he said. "If we give up our ethics, what do we have left? The future is bright; it's neither grim not dark. We've got the potential for a post-scarcity economy from the work on nanofactories that I'm seeing, what with the combination of the D-Engine. God, if Project Prometheus works properly, we're maybe ten years away from a colony on Mars, and less from a Luna mining base. We need a proper foundation for the world that's going to come."

"I'm not going to argue politics with you. Right now, that is. At the moment, I just want to sleep until she wakes up again, and starts crying. Hopefully not. But hope seems futile at times like this."

Harlan pointed towards staircase, in a mock serious style. "Jah! You go uppen das stairs unt get sum sleep unt stop begink das sad gurl! I vill look after der kinder!" he said, putting on a truly atrocious German accent.

Alba merely cuffed him over the back of the head, and left, smiling. Harlan finished his coffee, and got up, stretching. Wandering through the house, he poked his head around the doorway to the room where his little girl slept.

The two-month old slept in the cot, her mass of dark hair, just beginning to grow, ruffled and messy. Somehow, in the night, she'd twisted around, and was lying the wrong way around, feet on her pillow and head resting on four rag dolls. She cried if you took any of the four away from her, and then it was hell to quiet her down again.

Harlan lend over and kissed his daughter on the cheek. She was going to see a better world, he was sure of it. One where there wouldn't be war, wouldn't be famine, wouldn't be disease. One where humanity owned the solar system, the planned network of colonies given air by his altered plants. She, and eight billion others.

There would be no child soldiers. No unethical experiments. No thought police. No liberties sacrificed in the name of security.

The future was bright.

~'/|\'~

**October 8th, 2091**

The view from the screens mounted along the inside of the aeroplane showed only the greyish-white of the cloud layer, even as the plane descended. In the Aeon War, transport by plane, especially for High Value Targets, which took them anywhere close to the Migou was done by specialist stealthed, sub-sonic aeroplanes. More mundane transport took routes that wasted time avoiding the Migou-controlled north but could go supersonic, as they were unconstrained by the need for stealth. The crossing of the Atlantic had become a problem with the Migou domination of the polar regions, forcing planes to take the much less time-efficient (fuel consumption no issue to a vehicle with A-Pods) routes that, although appearing straight on a map, were not when the non-Euclidean nature of the surface of the Earth was taken into account.

Not the bad kind of Aeon War Syndrome-inducing non-Euclidean geometry, though.

How certain examples of geometry which defied the mundane, intuitive understanding of the world induced AWS, while other examples could be accepted with a shrug, was a question which occupied psychologists, neurobiologists and philosophers (although the former two were observed to be considerably more useful in discussions) across the globe. The prevalent hypothesis was disturbing in its implications; Aeon War Syndrome was a flaw in human mental processing, optimised as it was for such ape-like actions as identifying the best fruit and clubbing other rivals over the head. This research was not classified, but it remained unofficially restricted to professional circles. It was demoralising to consider the fact that humanity was flawed in a way that the Migou, and even the Deep Ones were not; unable to look at the world without breaking.

As the plane passed over the coastline, glints metal in the water could be seen. Before the Second Arcanotech War had become the Aeon War when the Dagonites and the Rapine Storm had attacked, there had been a massive expansion of ship building, to transport cargo by sea. Now those ships had been uparmed, into crude, almost fully autonomous defence platforms which manufactured mines from large on-board nanofactories and placed them around in the area around them as a defence against the depredations of the Esoteric Order of Dagon. But this was a purely defensive measure. The Deep One cities known about by the NEG, close to land, had already been eradicated. Y'ha-nthlei was long since ruins, the records from February of 1928, though more than one hundred years old, was enough for the amphibious forces of the NEG; power armour and mecha alike, backed up by Skuld, Verdandi and Urd-class frigates, had razed the city. The strange spires, buoyed up by the water, had shattered and fallen by the actions of a species that aged and died, in a manner unlike their builders.

Of course, to Shinji Ikari, one of the individuals actually sitting in the plane as it passed into the North-East American Territory, all this information on such disparate subjects from logistics, human psychology and military tactics was wasted. The Second Innsmouth campaign was a topic in Modern History, an example of how the NEG could defeat the Dagonites and how they were much less of a threat than the sapient fungoid insects from Yuggoth, while the other subjects were completely unknown to him.

No, what he was mostly doing was sulking, in that bitter, slightly irate way that is characterised by being snippishly polite to everyone around you (and often accompanied by sarcasm and sickly sweet smiles), and thus has much more long term endurance than overt anger or a tearful breakdown. He had been in this mood for almost a week. It was self-indulgent, he knew, but self-indulgence had its place when you were stuck piloting a war machine which hurt you when it was damaged; a result which was both rather common and had led to several of the technical staff making heartfelt requests that he try keep the Evangelion intact. As if he wasn't already trying. It wasn't helped by the slightly-too tight collar of the clothes that Misato had picked out for him for the conference, in a greyish blue that reminded him too much of the skin (no, he reminded himself. It was the armour, in the camouflage scheme) of Unit 01. The prime cause, however, was what he had seen during the guardian-teacher conference.

_Sitting in the dark auditorium, listening his father give a speech on how the NEG required the next generation to do everything they possibly could to ensure that the species would survive. Noting how similar the vocabulary was to talks that he had heard before from the man and from Fuyutsuki; being sure that Gendo was talking to him alone out of the audience._

Watching how, after the end of the speech, his father had left rapidly, along with "Ayanami, Rei", at the start of the alphabet, to have a whistlestop talk with each of the teachers. He seen through one of the windows, and observed Rei, surprisingly animate, sitting beside Gendo; a benevolent, paternal smile on his face. He would certainly have no objections to her academic performance, Shinji knew. She always seemed able to keep her marks up, even when he was slipping, worn out by the rigorous training regimes and the lack of time to do homework which ensued.

Seeing that faint flicker of surprise from each the subject teachers in turn to see that "Ikari, Shinji" was accompanied by a woman not related to him. That had perhaps been the worst part; the flicker of the eyes that showed relief, and the slight raising of the eyebrows when they saw Misato enter, clad in her too-short skirt, when they had so obviously, to his mind, been expecting a second nerve-racking meeting with the local Representative of the Ashcroft Foundation.

Misato had noticed this, and had, with what appeared as unusual tact to those who underestimated her, decided that it would do Shinji good to get away from London-2 for a while. With Unit 01 still out of operation due to Shinji exhausting their supply of spare parts, he was not needed in London, and thus she could take him to the Araska Conference, in the Chicago Arcology, capital of the New Earth Government.

"An ASTA-447 "Firefly" transport aeroplane," gushed Ken for the nth time, from the other side of the hold, as he danced around the other items being transported. The Firefly was a general transport plane, as it was not worth it to send a specialist passenger plane, and so Ken was receiving a double bargain by getting a good look at the other mecha being transported to the American Territory. "I never thought I'd get a chance to be on one!" He swung his specialist recorder (as opposed to the more common smaller ones, integrated into almost all Personal CPUs) onto a pristine Xiphos Amphibious Artillery Support Mech, crouched and locked into position for transport. "It's great to have friends like you, Shinji," he added yet again, his attentions entirely consumed by the cornucopia of technological delights that surrounded him.

Shinji shrugged.

Misato smiled broadly, from across the hold, strapped into her military crash seat. This appearance was incongruous with her dress, a black, long sleeved garment cut to the knee; an obviously human style, trimmed in dark red. "I thought it was very stuffy stuck in the arcology day after day, so I invited you three along with us to Chicago."

Ritsuko looked up from the tome that she was reading on her PCPU. "You're showing your age, you know. Those three are used to life inside. You can probably count the number of times they've been outside on your fingers." She paused for a moment. "Hmm, you'd probably have to add in toes, too. Besides the point." She looked back down at her document, her blue dress considerably less militant in its style than Misato's.

The black-haired woman shook her head. "Shut up, Rits," she said, without malice.

Toja had remained almost silent for most of the flight. This had partly been because he had been staring at Misato in the dress, using all his talents for misdirection to make it seem that he was not. Sadly, these were quite deficient; the older woman was quite aware of his hormonal interest.

She just chose to ignore it.

"Are we landing soon?" he asked, his anthracite-coloured face a paler tone, obviously uncomfortable in the smarter clothing which had been made a precondition for him going on this trip.

"Why does everyone around me seem to get air sick?" Misato grinned, with pointed glances at both Ritsuko and Shinji.

Dr Akagi sighed. "That's not air sickness. That's having a functional cochlea. The only person who I've ever met who drives as badly as you do was an English teacher I once met when I worked in..."

Toja shook his head. "Oh, no, that's not it. It's just," he grimaced, "...it just that, outside. On the displays on the walls..."

"... she reminded me a lot of you, actually," trailed off Ritsuko, frowning slightly at Misato,even as she was ignoring Toja.

The walls were showing the approach to the massive conurbation of the Chicago Arcology. As the capital of the NEG, it had been the first to have construction begin, and so its design was slightly older; the poorer, outer districts more akin to a warren of hermetically sealed skyscrapers, connected by innumerable walkways which made the city below appear like some hellish spider of glass and steel had run rampant.

"Hmm?"

"Look, never mind. It's just nervousness about landing. Ignore me." He checked that his straps were securely fastened again.

Misato shrugged. "Okay, then. Nice hat, by the way," she added, as an afterthought. She successful suppressed a smile at the dim-witted smile that crept across the Nazzadi's face.

"Don't get any ideas," muttered Shinji to Toja, breaking out of his self-inflicted sulk to direct a sideways glance at his friend.

The seatbelt lights flashed back on, and with only a modicum of force, Ken was persuaded that it would be best for his long term health to sit down when the plane switched to VTOL mode, in preparation for landing.

~'/|\'~

The red-haired girl stood on the wide expanse of the airfield, one hand on a hip even as she shaded her eyes from the sunlight that streamed through the thinning cloud layer. It looked like it was going to be a pleasant day, lacking the autumnal chill which was common this late in the year. Of course, to the population of the Chicago Arcology, sealed in their self-contained ecosystem like (since eleven years ago, when the arcology-dwelling population exceeded 50% of humanity) the majority of the human population.

Asuka Langley Soryu didn't care about that. For one, she liked having a properly variable climate. Weather made things interesting; rather than just another day of a pleasant twenty five degrees Celsius. The kind of people who started shivering or sweating if the temperature moved three degrees from Arc Standard were, in her very precise opinion, weak and unfit. Moreover, this airbase, attached to the secure Chicago naval yards, was deemed secure; the eight hundred metre skeletal bulk of the first Invictus-Class Battleship that loomed to the north was cause and testament to that fact. This security enabled her to shed that annoying, bulky body armour which they insisted that she wear all the time.

The lose clothing required to conceal that fashion disaster could thus be discarded. Despite the slightly chill wind, she was wearing a yellow dress of a pronounced Nazzadi cut. That was, in fact, a slight point of regret; her midriff was getting rather cold. After all, these clothes were really meant to be worn, if they were to be worn outside at all, in the autonomous Nazzadi nation of Nazza-Duhni; what had once been Cuba. However, Asuka felt that the increased mobility of the garments of the dark-skinned siblings of humanity, as well as the fact that, in her humble opinion, the dress looked _damn_ good on her, more than made up for a brief inconvenience.

Even if a chill wind seemed to be picking up. She had made her decision, and to go back into the warm would be a sign of weakness.

As the Firefly landed, manoeuvring A-Pods flaring blue one last time to soften the inevitable bump, Ken was already loosening his restraints, camera at the ready as he sprinted down the still descending ramp. He was temporarily silent as the sight before him, a tech-head's personal dream. The bulk of the Invictus-class, the first, true battleship of the current design paradigm made a wonderful backdrop to the cornucopia of aeroplanes, stationary mecha and lesser ships.

"Great..." he muttered to himself, his voice rising in a crescendo. "Great... great... great! This is the kind of sight that should have a man on his knees!"

"That's what she said!" added Misato softly, with a smirk.

Ritsuko sighed, and rolled her eyes. Those eyes promptly crossed, as she parsed Misato's meaning (as opposed to merely running off reflex for that kind of comment), then returned to their elevated position.

"You know that they're really going to take it away from him," muttered Toja to Shinji, as they left the plane at a somewhat more sedate pace. "And wipe the memory. Probably take it full stop."

"Oh, yes," the Japanese boy answered. "It might make him be quiet for a little while and calm down."

"Do you want to tell him?"

Shinji thought for a moment. "Nah. He's having fun. Plus," he added, a smile twisting the corners of his mouth, "it'll make it funnier when we see the look on his face when they take it."

Toja snorted, the snort turning into a shout of alarm as the autumnal breeze caught the cap from his head, pulling it away with a fine caress and sending it moving chaotically through the air, tumbling and teasing.

"Hey! Wait! Wait!" he yelled, pursuing the errant head covering.

The glorious revolution of the proletariat hats against the evil, corrupt tyranny of the bourgeois head was brought to a calamitous end by the intercedence of the class treachery of a single red shoe, oppressing and enslaving it beneath its bulk. Not content with that, the shoe also ground the hat into the hard tarmac of the runway, covering it in the dirt that builds up in a place where heavy machinery is transported. Toja dove to the ground, trying to free his new hat from its other captor.

Asuka stared at the new arrivals with eyes like sapphires, radiating an aura of certainty and confidence. "Hello, Misato," she said to the older woman. "And Ritsuko. How have you two been?"

"I am fine," answered the doctor, discretely pressing a few buttons on her wrist mounted PCPU.

Misato winced slightly, and massaged the back of her head. "As well as might be expected. You look even taller than the last time I saw you, back in '89."

Asuka smiled broadly. "Yes. And I've filled out, too. It means I can get away with proper Nazzadi dresses."

Both Toja, down by her feet trying to recover his hat, and Shinji, back over by the two older women, went a little blank as the truth of that statement hit them. Ken, still running around exactly like a small child given roughly half its body mass in caffeine, was also slightly blank, but that was due to his proximity to large amounts of shiny, shiny things designed to kill.

"Well, anyway," continued Misato, "let me introduce you... let me introduce both of you. Shinji, this is Asuka Langley Soryu..."

"Second Lieutenant Asuka Langley Soryu," she interjected.

"I'm sorry," Misato apologised. "I forgot; I guess I'm too used to thinking of you as little Asuka," she smiled, not noticing the slight hardening of her expression that caused. "Let me begin again. This is the Second Child, Second Lieutenant Asuka Langley Soryu, the exclusive pilot of Evangelion Unit 02, the first Mass Production Model."

It was, of course, at that precise moment that the breeze picked up, a short lived gust sweeping across the open tarmac, whipping at legs with a sudden chill. And for those people who had chosen to wear loose fitting dresses, the wind had a certain elevating effect.

Three slaps followed in remarkably quick succession to the trio of Ken, Shinji and Toja, who had been in the prime position to discover that the Second Child wore white underwear.

Scrambling to his feet, cap in hand, Toja glared at the girl, red eyes glowing with rage. "What'd the hell you do that for!"

Asuka sniffed. "Pretty cheap for the view, yes?" she replied, a steely tone in her voice.

"Cheap! But... but," the Nazzadi spread his hands wide in confusion, "why? Why? Why would you wear a loose dress like that when it's windy! It's just asking for that to happen!" He degenerated into inarticulate noises of frustration.

"So, anyway, where is the much vaunted..."

"And another thing," interjected Toja. "I think it's _harangi_ hypocritical to wear one of our dresses and then get pissy about showing something as small as underwear!"

The Nazzadi received a matching blow to the other cheek as a response, his coal-coloured skin leaving the growing red marks almost invisible. He clutched his face in pain and moaned, even as Asuka strode by.

"So, anyway, as I was saying, where is the much vaunted Third Child?" She looked around, before matching the face on the file to the Japanese one in the smart blueish-grey clothes, glaring at her, with a prominent red hand print on his face.

_Hmm. Collateral damage from my defence of my dignity._

Oh well.

She turned to face him properly, their eyes; hers a pair of unyielding sapphire crystals, his a darker blue, locked for one moment that seemed to exist out of time. And on both sides, there was a terrible stirring, as something within them recognised the other on sight, something that screamed that they were as alike as two sides of a coin.

It was not a pleasant feeling.

_Those eyes..._

_That bone structure..._

_That feel..._

_I've met this person before._

Asuka broke the eye contact first, turning to Misato.

"He seems rather dull. Not like the kind of person who could kill a Herald."

Inside, her thoughts were churning.

_How does he look so much like his picture in the file and from the training videos? It's really uncanny. And it's obvious that he's horrible untrained. The first signs of _it _are only just starting to show. I'd bet that he hasn't even noticed the physical changes._

Misato held her face impassive. "No, he's the one. Asuka, this is Test Pilot Shinji Ikari, the pilot of Evangelion Unit 01, the Test Model."

Shinji cocked his head. "And it's up to three Heralds, so far. Actually," he added with a slight smirk. He was sure that this was probably a bad idea, aggravating the Second Child in this way. On the other hand, she could deal with some hurt feelings, if he could deal with the fact that he had just been slapped around the face. Toja was right that it was all her fault, anyway, for wearing that stupid (although he did have to admit, very attractive) dress.

"Only because Command haven't let me near one, yet, idiot!" Asuka replied, surprising Shinji with her vehemence. "I'm 'merely' a veteran of the Eastern Front, with two Swarm ships, as well as many more lesser Migou mecha under my belt. And I haven't taken any damage, unlike you. I heard that you've basically forced your inferior machine to have to undergo several full rebuilds."

"Well, it's just as well that I've still managed to kill more Heralds than you, with an 'inferior machine'. I wonder how I could have done with your 'superior' Mass Production model," Shinji retorted back.

"Your choices were always flawed!" riposted Asuka, deep-running anger (at the NEG for putting her in the wrong place, at Kaji, for rejecting her yesterday, at the world) boiling forth with a palpable throbbing in her skull.

Misato sighed loudly, surprised at the way the conversation had escalated. "Please, you two. If you are going to start fighting, please can we get off this chilly runway into some place warm?"

Asuka blinked twice, heavily, then turned to Misato, her face innocent. "I'm very sorry, Major," she said, in a tone of voice that she knew sounded perfectly sincere. "We just got off to the wrong foot." She laughed. "I think we can put that down to the wind. Shall we go?"

Misato stared at her for a moment, her face dubious. Then she shrugged. "Okay, let's go inside, and try to work out how to get to the Conference." She paused. "Uh... Rits?"

The blond haired woman looked up from the PCPU she had been reading throughout the brief conflagration of egos, watching the Children with half an eye. "Oh, no. I've a meeting to go to before it starts." At the expression on Misato's face, at the prospect of having to find her way around, not helped by the fact that high security facilities did not put their maps onto the local metanet, she smiled, a grin with a faint hint of anticipation. "Don't worry. I called ahead; there's someone to meet you in Primal."

The Major sighed in relief. "Right, you four. Come with me," she said, as she headed off to the Terminal building on one side of the runway.

As they walked, Asuka leaned looked sideways at Shinji, holding that innocent expression on her face. "_Ich bin eine Göttin der Gewalttätigkeit_," she said, softly, to Shinji, smiling widely as she stared into his eyes with an emotion that she couldn't identify, the faintest hint of a headache pounding as she stared at her primary rival. "_Mach mich nicht wütend, Schwachkopf, sonst wird dich das deinen Kopf kosten._"

Shinji frowned, trying to recall what German he had picked up from one of his foster mothers, Gany, even through a slight nausea and the ache in his face from the slap. "Ich bin traurig," he began, hesitatingly, "aber Sie ... breten... Brechen...ie vierte ... um...Wand dort..."

Her eyes widened as she realised that he may have actually understood that, before setting in a narrowed glare, as she interrupted his broken German. "_Dein Akzent ist sehr schlicht. Du klingst teilweise japanisch, teilweise englisch und benutzt einen archaischen Wortschatz,_" she said, very rapidly, staring at his eyes for a flicker of recognition. When she saw mostly confusion, she relaxed slightly, repeating what she had said in English. "Your accent is terrible. It's part Japanese, part English, and you're using a rather archaic vocabulary." She frowned. "Why do you even speak any German, even that badly? I'm not sure that's right."

Shinji noted the fact that the revelation that he understood even a little German had shaken her. Mind you, the way that she had calmed down so quickly was rather... strange.

"Oh, I wasn't ever taught," he said, with a smile almost as sweet, and about as genuine, as hers. "I just picked it up from one of my foster mothers. Although," the smile remaining fixed, "I can't see what you mean by 'not right'..."

Misato noted the incipient tactical use of excess politeness, and moved to prevent the skirmish going strategic. Again.

_What was up with those two? Is it hate at first sight? I'm not really sure. Why are they acting like two of Rits' cats who've been shut in a room together?_

Okay, maybe they got off to a bad start, what with the whole slapping thing. Yeah, that explains it. Silly me.

~'/|\'~

By the time that the group had got to Primal, a heavily reinforced, squat building, the roof bristling with semi-autonomous air defences, which looked like it could survive a direct hit from a Swarm Ship (and was in fact designed with that intention), Misato had positioned herself in-between the two Children. Primal was in fact the terminal for the airport attached to the construction yards; the name a legacy of the somewhat quirky sense of humour common among engineers, and would lead into the secure transit system which ran below Chicago-2. This infrastructure was used for the transport of large objects which would block up the main arcology system, but also had a secondary role in moving troops and important people around, away from spying eyes. In the situation of a direct Migou assault on the arcology, it would also serve as shelter, although strategic estimates were that the main role such as shelter would play would be to lure Migou forces into tight quarters where their numerical superiority could not be used. The survival of any civilians was tertiary in the role of the shelter. The whole network was so theoretically important that the entire system had been built by the NEGA, with only limited access permitted to even the Ashcroft Foundation.

Of course, all this security mean nothing if Ms Katsuragi was incapable of finding the entrance to the system in Primal, a situation which was proving to be true. Naturally, with the efficiency so beloved of military secrecy, the entrance to the network was not marked on the public map of the area, and deep and detailed inquisitions of Asuka had only revealed that she had been driven here in an IFV, as she had been staying in military quarters while they went through the tests on Unit 02.

Sighing at the stupidity of the world and its inability to put up proper signposts, Misato balled up her fists, stared at the ceiling, and let out a soft moan of frustration and irritation at the world.

A hand tapped her on the shoulder.

"I'm sorry, but are you lost, unknown yet beautiful lady?" said a far, far too familiar voice in that smirking tone she could still remember, the cadences unchanged since university.

Her eyes opened wide in shock, then after a few surprised seconds her face set itself in a façade of weariness, eyes narrowed. Ryoji Kaji presented himself for examination, leaning against the wall behind her, briefcase in hand, in what had been a neat blue shirt and tie before he had gotten his unshaven face through the collar. He looked almost identical, up to the same laconic grin; how she had failed to notice him was surprising.

_But then again, showing up when not expected was always one of his major talents. Like that time he came in through the window when we were trying to hold a secret 21st for him, because he couldn't be bothered to take the stairs... no! That's irrelevant! Focus!_

Misato's concentration was not aided by Asuka's squealed cry of "Kaji", nor by her look of glee nor the position that younger girl's hands took, clutched together at her chest.

"What are you doing here?" she growled at him.

Kaji shrugged. "I was assigned monitoring duties over Superbia until she was transferred to London-2. And, before you ask, I have no clue why an intelligence analyst was made to do that."

The Major glared at him. "You. An intelligence analyst."

"Yes. Ryoji Kaji, GIA," he added in a deliberately 'film spy' tone of voice. "I'm with the OCI, and I think you can understand if that's all I can tell your."

The glare continued. "You. With the Office of Central Intelligence. I think we can both remember the time we saw your most recent EMSS scores, and they wouldn't waste such a talented somatic on data analysis."

The glare was countered with another shrug. "Let's not get into silly arguments about the past. You seem to be lost, and I'm headed in the direction of the Araska Conference."

"You mean you were told to show us the way by Ritsuko," Misato growled. "She knew. She damn well knew."

"Well, yes, but it was more fun this way," replied Kaji, the laconic grin turning temporarily impish before returning to its normal state of slightly detached amusement.

The black-haired woman sighed. "Come on, then. I was careless," she muttered, more to herself than to anyone else. "I should have expected this sort of thing to happen. No one else has skeletons in their closets like this."

Kaji stepped aside, to reveal that he had been standing in front of an admittedly small sign pointing towards the "Chicago Deep Transit Network", obscuring it from sight. Then, totally ignoring the capital-grade intensity of Misato's stare, he led the party to a wide, open spacious lift that could have held three times their number, leading down from Primal to the transit network, a trail of muttered curses in Japanese following him.

~'/|\'~

"Alice."

"Ritsuko."

The two blond women, both not naturally that colour, sat facing each other over a table. The room was empty apart from them; this meeting of the Project Directors for Project Evangelion and the Herkunft Institute, the formal sub-component of the Ashcroft Foundation responsible for Project Herkunft, was of such sensitivity that no-one else would be allowed in. Formally, too, there would be no surveillance. Of course, both women knew that at least one group would almost certainly be observing them, as the tendrils of AHNUNG could reach (even? Especially? Neither one knew which word was more appropriate) into the depths of secure Ashcroft facilities., and despite the countermeasures, there was no guarantee that other groups, such as the OIS or GIA, could not be watching.

Such paranoia was but routine for a Project Director in the Strange Aeon. Although even the term paranoia was not quite accurate, as the fear was quite justified.

Dr Akagi stared across the table at her... she didn't even have a correct word to describe her relationship with Dr Alice Wade. As heads of independent Projects, they lacked the innate opposition that Evangelion and Engel had with each other, and against the rival NEG Project Araska; the fields of the military applications of arcanocyberxenobiological studies and of general research into the innate use of personal arcanonoetic orgone were not competitive, and indeed were highly complementary. And of course, the manipulative cabal and Gendo Ikari together had made it so there was overlap between the Children and the Infants. At a more personal note, they were both top-end scientists in a field of study where the average working career was measured in the single digit years before the inevitable burnout and the usual resultant confinement to an asylum (oh, they tried to dress up the name, but it meant the same). Both of them were already defying the odds with their sanity, such as it was.

Yet neither of them trusted each other. They didn't know how their personal instructions differed, and of course there was the personal loyalty to their patrons; Ritsuko suspected that Alice's loyalty to the Minister of War went almost as deep as her own loyalty to the L2 Representative, but she couldn't be sure. And there were secrets in both of their pasts. They had both lost a parent in the kind of accident that most call an "accident", not to mention the various things that they both did with Grade A Hazardous Arcane Materials (as determined by the RTE) without the knowledge of anyone but their immediate superiors in Ashcroft.

The two women continued staring at each other. Ritsuko cracked first.

"We need to talk about the First Child," she said, to the Caucasian woman. "You know quite clearly that on the twelfth of August, we almost had a Synchronisity Incident."

"I know," Alice replied in a cool tone of voice. "Gendo has already told me in person the details of that incident."

Ritsuko held her face still at the way that she talked about Representative Ikari.

_He... he couldn't be sleeping with her, could he? No, that's just petty rivalry getting in the way. He wouldn't do that._

"But it has not happened again, despite the same conditions, correct?" continued the other woman.

"Correct."

"Then I would suggest that it was caused by one of two things. This is merely a hypothesis, of course." Alice cocked her head. "Unless you would like to give us full access to your files and work logs, so we can perform a proper analysis of the Potential SI?"

Ritsuko shook her head. "Of course not."

"As expected. Well, the prime hypothesis is that the noetic link between the Thir... the First Child and the 00-Natum you're using in your Engel..."

Dr Akagi narrowed her eyes, then relaxed them. Dr Wade knew fully the difference between the two, and knew too the fact that it was a trigger for her.

"... then that opened a conduit between her and the fifth dimensional standing waveform of Subject Lilitu."

This time the eyes opened wide. "You mean that the waveform is still intact?" said Ritsuko, her voice full of shock and even a little terror.

Dr Wade's eyes twitched slightly, an unconscious jerking movement to the right. "Yes. Not only is it intact, but it's actually growing in potency. Trapped in the ABN Grade-A facility, it's proving to be self-reinforcing." She sighed bitterly. "Not many people can just refuse to die. Almost none, in fact. Subject Lilitu can. And has."

There was a chill moment of silence.

"We'll need to get going soon, or we'll miss the conference," said Ritsuko, trying to reassert normal conversation.

"We have some time, still. Who's going to be there? I know that there's Miyakame, and others from Engel."

"Yes, he's actually showing his face from his office," Dr Akagi said,with a hint of bitterness. "Have you seen the Hamshall-Model Aquatic Assault Engel? The old man is slipping. He hasn't even really bothered to hide the source of his arcanocyberxenobiological template. The main change appears to have been the removal of the wings."

"That is worrying, it is true. You might not like him, Ritsuko" the other woman said, with a hint of sadness, "but it'll be a tragedy when we lose his mind. And he does too, of course."

Ritsuko winced. "Very poor taste."

"I'm sorry. Yes, it was. Who else? There's a delegation from Project Amunet, of course. You're there with Project Evangelion. Anyone else from your team?"

"The Director of Operations, Major Katsuragi is with me, along with the Third Child. You know, too, that the Second Child is already here; we're taking her back with us."

"Yes, I saw the demonstration. The MP Model really is impressive, you know. It's a line-breaking super-heavy unit, of course, not a mainstream unit like a Vreta, a Broadsword or even a Malach, but I think, from what I've heard if you can sort out the problems with the control scheme and find a way to get pilots who are actually legal, there probably will be a wide expansion. I was particularly impressed by the video of Unit 02 deployed with Task Force... was it Valkyrie or Einhejar?"

"Valkyrie, and I know. I really didn't expect dropping giant robots out of planes to attack flying ships to be a good idea," said Ritsuko, with a hint of sarcasm, "but it worked. This time." She paused. "Pentheus and Hector from Paragon are here, too," she added, very deliberately. "I'm sure Herkunft would like to see that."

Dr Wade stared at Dr Akagi over the top of her AR-enhanced glasses. "So, you know about that."

"It wasn't exactly subtle. I only had to put a few things together; personal records, EMSS Latency Tests, the fact that the L2 AA was already a Grade B facility, the security around the Wade AP... Of course, having access to the First Child helped enormously; the retro-viral gene markers were rather obvious when you knew what to look for."

"Well," the woman paused. "Thank you. I think. I'm certainly going to have a chat with those two about the Project." She called up the time on her glasses. "And now we really do have to go."

~'/|\'~

One rather pleasant lift journey later, had it not been marred by the simmering annoyance of Misato towards Kaji and the way it filled the room, or the fact that Kaji was trying to keep at least two people between himself and a clingy Asuka without looking like he was doing anything, and a short walk to the nearest point, and they found themselves seated in a somewhat smaller transit car.

This was, of course, the site of more intermittent skirmishing. Kaji had managed to obtain the seat opposite to Misato, and was leaning in a pseudo-infatuated manner, gazing into her eyes, while his feet tried to entangle hers. From the way that his expression failed to change when her shoes made contact with his shins, as they would when she felt he was getting too forward, Misato suspected that he was doing it deliberately, to annoy her. The irritation was further raised by the presence of Asuka hovering on Kaji's left, who was herself glaring at Misato for the undue attention that the elder woman was raising from her unrequited beloved. Toja had claimed the seat beside Misato, but was actually backed away from her in his seat, the waves of distemper positively palpable, while Ken and Shinji were left to head the table, safely away from the social combat.

Leaving his coffee to cool, Kaji, out of the blue, asked Misato, "So… are you seeing anyone?"

"It's none of your business, is it?" Misato replied, arms folded defensively, staring out of the window at the sights from the passing tunnel network.

"You're ice cold, that's always been your problem," the man replied, with a perfectly straight face. That was a little too much for Shinji, and he snorted, narrowly avoiding spraying drink from his nose. Kaji smiled broadly, and turned to Shinji. "So I hear you live with Katsuragi-san now?" he asked

"Yes," the boy replied, his own cup of coffee in hand, after swallowing hard.

"So... how much is she actually in her bed? If you know what I mean. Has she ever... wandered through?" the older man asked, the corner of his mouth turned up in a way that would have contravened public decency laws in the old restrictive societies before the NEG.

The comment caused an instant recoil in the other individuals around the table. In retrospect Shinji felt, instinctively, that he should have had some witty comeback, some dry remark or even some impromptu prop humour. However, sadly, he had no knowledge that _such_ a remark would come out of the blue like that, and so he recoiled in shock along with the rest of them.

Misato, of course, did not recoil, but instead ignited, her face turning bright red as she went from seated to arms slammed down on the table, looming over Kaji without passing through the intervening space.

"What the hell do you mean by that!" she roared, drawing back a fist to punch him in the face. And it would have quite explicitly been a punch, not a slap.

Kaji sighed, and smiled, seemingly not concerned by the wrathful _erinys_ shadowing him. "So, no, she hasn't changed a bit, has she?" he said, in a tone of voice that sounded somewhat sad... even disappointed. "I've never known anyone to get so upset about sleepwalking."

That comment deflated Misato, the red rage departing leaving only a blush of embarrassment at the cheeks. "It's still not nice to talk about someone's private life in that manner," she muttered, as she returned to her seat. "Or shall I start talking about..."

"Nope, she hasn't changed at all, Shinji Ikari," the man added loudly over Misato's mutterings.

"Well, lacking any context to compare her to any time before," Shinji made a big show of looking at the calender feature on his wrist PCPU, "... uh... carry the nine.... add five... subtract five... the nineteenth of August, 2091, I really can't comment on any changes or lack thereof."

Kaji smiled. "You'll do well in any public appearances you have to do for the NEG with that kind of attitude. Nicely done. I especially liked the way you avoided mentioning any changes which may have occurred since that date."

"Uh... thanks," Shinji replied, hesitantly. "So, you... um... Mister Kaji..."

"Ryoji Kaji, GIA," the man answered, in exactly the same tone of voice he had used before. "Most people just call me Kaji."

"If we're made to be polite," muttered Misato.

"But, yes," he continued. "You are of course the famous Third Child, who piloted an Evangelion without any prior training and managed to kill a Herald who had broken through all of L2's defences."

Shinji could suddenly feel a concrete burning sensation all over the surface of his skin, as Asuka turned her narrow eyed glare at him.

"That one was luck, I have to say," Shinji admitted. Much as it irked him to appear to lessen himself before that aggressive red-haired girl, he felt that this might just be a suitable peace offering. "I wasn't in control; that was all Unit 01 doing it."

"But before that," the older man pointed out, "you were walking and had full limb control. I heard it took the First Child seven months to form a stable connection."

"And that's not all," interjected Misato. "Shinji, you've killed all the Heralds so far. You shouldn't sell yourself short."

_Is that _pride _in her voice?_

"Well, I guess," he stammered out, concious of Asuka's glare and its intensity, even through the resurgent headache.

Kaji stood up and stretched. "Well, I'm not actually here for the conference. I'll be getting off the stop after next." He winked. "I may end up seeing you all again sometime, though." He turned, to look down at Asuka, beside him. "This is... well, farewell for now." He turned to face the others. "If you will excuse us for a while, I need to say goodbye."

Shinji shuffled out the way to let them past, sitting back down. Misato had, by this point, collapsed on the the table, arms cradling her head.

"So... um... Kaji. He seems... rather lively," he ventured, wincing slightly.

_Good. The headache seems to be going._

Misato groaned. "This. This whole thing. It's just a dream, or a nightmare. It has to be. Please."

Outside, in the connection to the next car along, a specialised cargo transport, Kaji searched the racks for his briefcase, while Asuka slumped against the wall, a look of disdain on her face.

"So," said Kaji, deliberately off hand, "what do you think of Shinji Ikari, then."

Asuka narrowed her eyes again. "He's stupid, annoying, arrogant, and far too dependent on fluky skill than actual talent. Just being around his not-very-attractive face gave me a headache." She sighed melodramatically. "You know, I'm worried about the candidates they have for the Evangelion Project if he's the best they could come up with."

"So it isn't anything to do with the fact that he got a synchronisation ratio of 54%, with a dee-ess by dee-tee of less than 1% the first time they put him in it, is it," asked Kaji, testing the waters.

"Oh, I'm not denying that he has natural talent," she replied, blushing slightly. "But natural talent isn't enough," she added. Kaji was sure that there was a hint of wistfulness in that tone.

_Good. Sounds like a nascent crush. This will be good for her. The first prolonged period of time she'll have spent with anyone her own age since she was four._

"But, Kaji, I don't understand why you need to leave me," she added, in a sad (too sad, he thought, to be natural) tone of voice. "Why do I have to go to live with that woman. Why can't I stay with you. Why can't I stay with _anyone_, ever!" The last words were said in a hushed shout.

"Now, now," he replied, as he, unusually, did up his top buttons and straightened his tie, raking his fingers through his hair in an attempt to tidy it up. "It's a matter of security. The Children were always intended to be deployed as a single unit, at least for the first group, and Misato was on the candidate list of people with sufficient clearance to host the Children until they were legally adults." He shrugged. "And you two have met before, after all."

"I know," she replied, her face wracked with genuine anguish, as the train pulled to a stop. "It makes sense. It's logical. It's just that... just that... I'll miss you, Kaji."

"Welcome to Auburn Central," announced the train LAI. "Please have all appropriate security documentation ready."

The man nodded. "I know."

And with that, Kaji stepped off the train, off to the Chicago-2 Grade A Storage Facility. He had a date with destiny, and certainly didn't want to keep it waiting.

~'/|\'~

The rest of the trip passed without incident, if one were not to count the confiscation of Ken's camera and the wiping of all of its memory as an incident. Hence, the group that arrived in the Li Lecture Centre was somewhat desolate although individually for completely different reasons.

Therefore, when they arrived at the anteroom to the main conference centre, group cohesion disappeared very rapidly.

"Man," Toja muttered to Shinji, as they migrated towards the snacks that were being served, "I don't know why I even agreed to come with you lot on this trip."

"As I recall, you seemed convinced that this was some kind of date with Misato," pointed out Shinji. "Despite my attempts to point out that it wasn't."

"I don't remember any attempts to point it out," the Nazzadi replied.

"That's because there weren't any," admitted Shinji. "I found it sort of amusing."

Toja shook his head. "You're a really bad person, you know." He sighed. "Some day, you'll be the death of me, with your evil plans to get me to waste away while in pursuit of the fair Major Katsuragi."

"Well, then. You know what to do," Shinji replied, with a half-smile on his face. "You can stop chasing after my guardian. It's annoying when it doesn't succeed, and it would be creepy if it did."

Toja made a non-committal grunt. "How are you holding up, mate?" he asked Ken, changing the subject. "They may have wiped your camera, but at least you'll have all your memories, right?"

"And uploaded a hunter-seeker to your storage account, too, don't forget that," added Shinji, gingerly. "That is why they took the camera, to hit your upload server."

Ken sighed. "Yeah, I guess. It's just really, really annoying. The rest won't believe what I've seen. And I promised Taly a shot of the C2 docks, too..."

There was a moment of shocked silence.

"You... and Taly," stated Shinji.

"As in, Miss Annoying Nazzadi Idiot Bigot. Miss Humans-are-House-Apes," added Toja.

"Miss Everything Nazzadi Is Better, Especially The Mecha... ah. I see," continued Shinji, as something clicked. "Mecha fangirl, am I correct."

Ken grinned, widely. "Yeah. Like you wouldn't believe it. And I just happen to be the best informed about everything military and bipedal in the whole Academy, which is quite an achievement, I can tell you that."

Toja grabbed Ken in a head-lock. "Nice one. Even if she's a horrible person, she is hot. Really, really hot." He sniffed, in an excessively melodramatic fashion. "I'm so proud of you."

"Guys," warned Shinji, "there are probably more security guards here than at school, and that's saying something. Not to mention the cameras. So let's keep the tactile affection to a form that doesn't look like you have in a head lock."

The boys sprung apart. "Yeah," muttered Toja. "I don't want to be tased again."

They both shuddered.

"Anyway," continued Shinji, "yeah, the fact that she's a subspeciesist jerk is overcome by her hotness."

"Seriously, guys, she's not really that bad," Ken replied, with a hint of indignation. "Yeah, she can be a bit unpleasant, but she mostly puts it on to annoy her step-mother."

Toja nodded, understandingly. "Ah. It all makes a lot more sense now. It's kinda common for kids whose parents end up remarrying humans. Making them put on more clothes, or even _some_ clothes, and speak in English; you're all a bunch of horrible fascist tyrants," he added, flashing his prominent canines in a grin.

"We are not," Shinji replied, also with a smile.

"Are too... nah, it was a joke. I love all you barely evolved tree dwelling apes... although only in a friendly way for you men."

"Lots of collateral damage there,Toja. You're the same species as we are, just repainted and with a new set of headlamps... oops, I mean 'eyes'," Shinji pointed out, "installed."

"Hey, I didn't say I wasn't a barely evolved ape too," said Toja, reasonably. He grabbed a banana (a real one; few expenses were being cut for this conference) from the fruit table. "See. I love bananas. Wow, fancy," he said, getting distracted by the genuine grapes on the table, and taking a handful. "Anyway, we're getting distracted. We were meant to be mocking Ken for being interested in Taly."

"While feeling slightly jealous about the fact that she appears to have some interest back," added Shinji. "You know when they say that a girl's got a wonderful personality, what that's really meant to mean? Yeah. She's the opposite of that."

Ken shrugged. "And it isn't anything beyond friendship, yet. Sadly. She showed up at TechSoc, we got into an argument about the MV-14 Scimitar against the ASM-XI Oryladi and their role as an artillery support mecha, we both shouted down Pauleyon when he dared suggest that the M-111A2 Jaeger was cooler, and things went from there."

Shinji shrugged, as he helped himself to an apple. "Well, I suppose it makes about as much sense as the fact that our friendship sort of started the day you punched me in the nose. I guess."

"Hey, Shinji!" called Misato, as she walked towards the three boys, two others in tow.

"Mmmph?" he asked, mouth full.

"Sorry, introductions first. Shinji, this is Colonel Rury, of the NEGA Special Weapons Division, and Juan Carlos, a Sub-Project Manager for Project... Herkunft, wasn't it?"

"Herkunft, yes," the man nodded.

"Juan, Rury, this is Shinji Ikari, Test Pilot of Evangelion Unit 01, the Prototype."

The Nazzadi woman, in a strict military uniform nodded. "Yes, I've read his file. Nice to meet you, Shinji. I suspect we're going to see quite a bit more of each other over the next few months, as the Evangelion project is fully integrated into the New Earth Government military."

"I can't help but feel a little apprehensive about that," Shinji remarked.

Red eyes stared at him, before her face broke into a smile. "Ah, good. Apprehension is probably the most human response when a mysterious woman in a NEGA uniform tells you that she's read your file and expects to see you a lot more. And much as certain elements might be disapproved of, necessity is a harsh mistress."

Shinji frowned.

_That wasn't reassuring at all._

"Well... I suppose..."

"Anyway," interrupted Misato, "what I came over to say was that I think it would be best if you went and tried to talk to Asuka. Perhaps, this time, without getting into a flaming row," she added, with a strong hint of sarcasm.

"She started it," muttered Shinji.

"Hmm," said the Major, and it was the word, rather than a sound. "Look, if you're going to be living under my roof, compromises will have to be made," added Misato.

Shinji sighed. "Very well."

He scanned the crowd, looking for any sign of that shock of red hair. This quest was not aided by the fact that the ante-room was filling up; the conference was due to start fairly soon, which would at least provide a concrete end-date for the upcoming conversation. He did vaguely consider just prevaricating, then telling Misato that he hadn't been able to find Asuka before the event, but, though he was loathe to admit it, she was right. Mutual hatred was probably not the best relationship to have with a girl who would be piloting a forty metre tall war machine along side him. And by "piloting", really, "controlling with her mind" was more accurate, bringing whole new areas for things to go wrong.

He found her in the corner of the room, slumped against a pillar, intently reading something on her PCPU. Asuka looked up as he approached.

"Oh, it's you,"she said, in a curiously impassive tone of voice quite out of sorts with how he had seen her act before. "Major Katsuragi told me that you might try to talk to me."

"Ah," Shinji replied. "She suggested that I come over and... well, talk to you."

Asuka shook her head. "I'm not really surprised. Warnings about not getting into a flaming row in public?"

"Uh huh."

"Harsh words about how compromises would have to be made if we're going to be living in the same house?"

"Yep."

"Those words coming immediately after I pointed out that it was all your fault?" added Asuka, confidentially, in a tone of voice that wasn't really a question.

"Switch the direction of blame around," replied Shinji, "and... yeah," he admitted.

"So let's be at least partially civil to each other for a few moments, and then we can go back to not talking," Asuka concluded.

"That works."

There was an uncomfortable silence.

"So, um."

"Yes."

The silence continued, just as the room filled up more.

"How can people who are so smart be so petty-minded," Asuka blurted out.

Shinji frowned. "I'm sorry?"

"All the people around us. Honestly, I try to contribute to a discussion about military tactics on the Eastern Front, and those idiot locked me out of the conversation. It's never anything overt, but I can see the way that they turn to ignore me, the way they look at me as if I'm a little girl, the way they dismiss me as not knowing enough." She snorted. "Close-minded fools."

"Maybe you didn't make a good first impression," Shinji blurted out, before he could stop himself. Internally, he winced. This was going to flare things up again.

Those eyes locked onto his. "What do you mean?" she replied, in a chilly voice.

"Well," he began, and paused. Honesty, or an attempt to defuse the situation? "You kind of started with me by slapping me, then calling me dull. Before I'd even said anything to you," he added, a hint of sarcasm creeping in. "I hope you didn't try that with them."

"Yes, but that was because I was defending my honour. In here, I didn't have a trio of perverts staring at me!"

The temporary truce was already breaking down.

"My heart bleeds, it really does. Honestly, haven't you spent enough time around Nazzadi to know their attitude to nudity? It shows in their fashion sense!"

Asuka looked shocked. "How dare you! And I suppose you're a master of Nazzadi culture, Mr One Of My Best Friends Is Nazzadi!"

"As a matter of fact, yes," retorted Shinji, trying to keep his voice down. "One of my foster mothers is one."

Asuka cocked her head slightly, and raised one hand. "Wait. Pause for a moment. I thought you lived with Misato."

"I do now," he replied, taking a deep breath and trying to calm down. "Since late August. When I was basically conscripted."

Asuka's eyes narrowed momentarily, at the reminder of how little training Shinji had been through. "Sometime today I'll show you what a real Evangelion looks like; a proper, MP Model."

Shinji blinked. "Wait, what? Where did that come from?"

A sigh escaped from the girl's mouth. "You've never seen what the finished model is mean to look like, only the incomplete Test Model and the Prototype. You'll want to see what the final design will look like; after all, they're obviously going to retrofit yours."

"But why..."

"Because it's obvious that the MP design is better! What are you, stupid?"

"_You're dead!_" shouted a voice from nearby, in a shocked tone. The surrounding conversation fell to a hush. "What are you doing here!"

A man, his hair snow white, was pointing at the pair of them, hand shaking as if with some palsy. He looked like he had some Caucasian blood in him, despite his predominantly Asian features, premature wrinkles etched into his forehead. A younger, Nazzadi man rushed up to him, lowering the arm, and gently tried to guide him away.

"Dr Miyakame, I think..."

"Don't 'Dr Miyakame' me," the man snarled. He stared at the pair, Asuka in particular, and blinked twice, data rolling across the AR glasses he wore. "I'm quite all right," he said, in a softer tone. "I just had a momentary shock." He shrugged off the younger man, in a way that showed he was considerably more fit than his prematurely aged features would suggest, and stepped towards the perplexed pair of Shinji and Asuka, hand (still shaking) held out.

"You would logically, therefore, be Kyoko's ... daughter," he said, carefully,as the conversation rose back to its previous level. "The spitting image. He turned to stare at Shinji, an unwrinkled hand taking the boy's chin, and moving it to various perspectives. "And you, of course... that nose, that facial shape. You're Gendo and Yui's, aren't you."

This somewhat unorthodox method of introduction left them both momentarily speechless, before Asuka, overcoming the surprise first, answered, "Yes, sir." She paused, smiling sweetly, in a rather rapid change from how she had been before, before continuing, "But you are?"

The old (though not as old as he looked) man frowned at her, slightly, before his face took on a slight smile. "Don't try that on me. Your mother used to try that; didn't work then, either. But to answer your question, well, I suppose neither of you would remember me. I'm Doctor Anton Miyakame, Director for Research and Development for the Engel Project. I..." he paused, eyes suddenly far away. "I worked with your parents in the development of the Evangelions." He blinked rapidly. "I'm sorry. It's been twelve years, and I've forgotten your names. Looking at you... well, time makes a mockery of a man who's suddenly feeling very old."

"Second Lieutenant Asuka Langley Soryu, pilot of Evangelion Unit 02," she replied, saluting the man.

"Shinji Ikari," Shinji added, considerably less triumphantly.

"He's the _Test Pilot_ of Unit 01," Asuka added, emphasising the peculiar rank that resulted as a consequence of Shinji's dubious legal position.

Dr Miyakame went pale for a second. "Oh my," he said, quietly. "Oh my." He blinked rapidly. "Oh my. It was just yesterday, it seems like sometimes, that you two were toddlers. And you're both piloting those... things."

"Yes," Asuka nodded proudly.

"Dr Miyakame," it was the young Nazzadi man, again, "there are some people who want to talk to you..."

"Go!" the doctor barked, and it was an actual bark, a feral sounding noise from deep in the back of his throat. The assistant flinched away, half-raising his hand above his head, disappearing into the crowd. He blinked twice. "I was the leader of the team," he continued, in the same calm tone of voice, "that worked with the noetic interface of the arcanocyberxenobiological organisms; those A10 Nerve Clips you have in your hair?" he said in a tone that mixed pride and sorrow, pointing at Asuka, "I designed them," he said, with what almost sounded like a guilty undertone in his voice. "I remember when I showed them off, in that team meeting," he added, his eyes going cloudy. "Your mothers had both bought you along. It was... well, towards the end of my... work with Evangelion," he continued, slowly, choosing his words. "It was already... getting tense. There were frequent... discussions. Heated discussions. Especially between Yui and Kyoko. I'm sorry about how I acted earlier. It's just... those words, and that tone of voice," he said to Asuka. "I suppose it's natural for you to look and sound a lot like her."

"No, honestly, it's fine," Asuka replied, with a broad smile.

He shook his head, a brief reflexive twitch. "Never mind. It's natural. Very natural. Exactly the same words. Anyway, we left you two with the Paragon child care." He chuckled then, a young-sounding noise quite out of line with his appearance. "I was with your mothers when they came to collect you; someone had to work as an intermediary, because, well, they weren't talking again. They had got into a design argument about control schemes, and well, Yui had started needling Kyoko about her... never mind." He shook his head, and blinked twice. "Apparently you two had squabbled for about five minutes, and someone had pushed the other one over. But then something had happened (which we never got the full story) and you'd ended up building a fort together." There was a faintly indulgent smile on the man's face. "And then you'd started bombarding the other children with plasticine bombs that you'd built, cheering when you scored a hit." The smile was replaced by sadness. "Of course, your mothers snatched you up and walked away without talking to each other. And then a few months later there were the... never mind."

The prematurely aged man sniffed.

"We have our own debts to pay. I failed them both. I tried to pay it off with the Engels, but seeing you two has reminded me of another one I have. Tell your Doctor Akagi that she'll be hearing from me."

And with that, the man walked off into the dense crowd, shoulders slumped.

"Uh, Dr Miyakame," Shinji called, but the man gave no sign of having heard.

He and Asuka gave each other worried glances out of the corners of their vision.

"That's pretty bad AWS," they both said, simultaneously.

_He's pretty crazy_ is what they both meant. Not that it was very nice to think like that, but it was true.

They then smiled faintly at the fact that they had shared that thought, then looked away; Shinji in embarrassment, Asuka in irritation.

"What was that about?" Shinji asked.

"Look, it's pretty obvious," Asuka replied, her normal personality reasserting over the shock that had almost given the other girl a foothold. "Obviously our mothers were colleagues..."

"He said 'parents'. Possibly my," Shinji felt bitter inside, at admitting the relationship, but continued, "father too? I know he's Ashcroft in a big way. Yours?"

"No." Asuka stated that absolutely. "Not a chance. Anyway, he worked with them." She swallowed. This would take some courage. "And then there were some... accidents."

She fell silent.

"Yes," Shinji said, softly, staring down at his hands.

There was a silence, though through this one there was some understanding.

"Did you hear him?" Asuka asked, staring blankly into the crowd. "He worked on the Evangelion control systems. That means he blames himself for the accidents."

The silence which followed was broken by a man in a NEG military uniform calling all guests into the main hall, for the start of the demonstration.

~'/|\'~

"The undue dominance of the bipedal weapons platform in modern military affairs has gone on long enough."

These were indeed fighting words. In the audience, after all, were both the Director for Research and Development, and the Director of Operations of Project Evangelion, and the Director for Research and Development of Project Engel. Not to mention, of course, the presence of several senior staff from the NEGA High Command. But, then again, the Daeva Project had always been a Navy plaything, and those words were not irregular complaints from the NEGN. The Director of the New Earth Government Project, Daeva, a weapons project unrelated to the endless sequence of Ashcroft Projects, knew this, and he was sure enough that he felt he could rile the audience a little before displaying the main project.

"A bipedal, humanoid design; it is fundamentally flawed as a weapons platform. I look before me, at the audience. I know that you are all intelligent individuals. I know you're all familiar with the concept of surface area-volume ratios, pressures, centres of mass and all those other little things that make the bipedal design a sub-optimal combat design. And I know that you know that. Despite the pressures from... certain groups and committees in the Army, the Vreta, despite its "official" role as a combat support unit, despite the fact that it uses last generation battlefield protection, despite all that... the Vreta is still the practical mainstay of the majority of the army outside of urban environments. It out-ranges every single mecha in the NEG arsenal... why do you think that is? Because it is designed so that the recoil of its main cannon is absorbed through a solid system, not stuck out on the end of limbs which reduce the size of weapons that may be mounted. Because it uses A-Pods as its exclusive method of transport, giving it a combat velocity twice that of a Broadsword. Because it is cheaper to build and easier to train crew to engage in combat operations in a Vreta than the multitasking required for a Broadsword. And yet there are elements in the High Command of the Army that want to phase it out."

The Nazzadi man, his red eyes gleaming in triumph, paused and took a sip of water.

"You might ask how this state of affairs came about. Indeed, I do so myself. The best explanation I have is that... we grew lazy." He paused, to let his comments sink in. "We got used to the D-Engine, and the fact that we now had a dependable source of constant, finite power. We got used to the Operator Side-Effect and the intuitive skills for piloting (though not, I may note, actual combat) that arcanotechnology granted us. We got so used to the current technological paradigm that we did not think outside the narrow walls of our box. It is true, yes, that with the D-Engine, we can overcome the massive power consumption required for mechanical bipedal locomotion. It is also true that if we cut out the middleman, and simply installed A-Pods, we would obtain a more stable firing platform, which could _also_ carry more armour, mount larger weapons _and_ move faster. Yes, all three. That is how much better, in a purely mechanical context, an armoured roughly cuboid shape is over a humanoid."

He inclined his head in turn towards Dr Akagi, then Dr Miyakame in turn, keeping a slight smile on his face.

"That is not, of course, to belittle the stellar work which our colleagues, and, yes, sometimes competitors in the various Ashcroft Projects have been doing. Thanks to them, we have a new element, that of the arcanobiological in military science. Their work in the fields of arcanocyberxenobiology have been instrumental in the continued survival of the human species. In the years since the deployment of the first Engel, they have proved their worth many times over. It is not surprising that twenty percent of the military bipeds larger than Powered Armour are now a product of the Engel Project. Indeed, the... unfortunate effects," and here, his voice took on a downcast tone, "that the Engel Synthesis Interface has on those pilots which volunteer for those cybernetic implants, and the necessary mental fortitude that candidates must have, are proving to be the main limiting factors on Engel deployment, not production. Likewise, the products of its predecessor group, Project Evangelion, which went public just this week, have proved astonishing in the termination of High Threat Extra-Normal Entities, even through their size and exceedingly limited numbers will mean that they will be never more than a highly specialised Heavy Assault Unit."

Shinji felt somewhat ambivalent about that. On one hand, it was true, and the man did make a lot of sense. On the other hand, it didn't feel right for this arrogant Nazzadi to be lecturing him on 'inefficiency' and damning them with faint praise. Around the table, though, both Ritsuko and Asuka appeared to be fairly livid at his words, while Misato was so bored that she... he squinted... she was drawing something on her napkin. Toja appeared to have gone to sleep, although that was uncertain; he had somehow propped up his head in a way that made him look like he was paying attention.

"But the point is," the Chief Engineer on Project Daeva continued, "they were still working with flawed materials. Before now, only bipeds, or, in the case of the Ish, snake-like aquatic creatures, have been able to incorporate the wonders and marvels of ACXB into their design." The man put both hands on the lectern, leaning forwards. "That, gentlemen and ladies, changes today."

Naturally, Ken was soaking it in. There had been a few squeaks of near terminal levels of happiness, but the boy appeared to still be alive, though approaching catatonia from endorphin overdose. That the speaker was insulting mecha with his every word and intonation seemed to have been overcome by the fact that _he was sitting in a real, really real, technical briefing_.

The man snapped his fingers, loudly, the amplified click echoing throughout the hall. At that command, the wall behind him faded to transparency, the amorphous material aligning to permit the passage of light.

"Behold, the Araska. The first functional battle-ready prototype from Project Daeva."

Behind him, beyond the metamorphic wall, was a leviathan. The first impression was one of massive, irresistible bulk. It looked almost as if it had originally been built with the harsh, square lines of human design, but all the edges had been smoothed, rounded off, while smaller bulges, ovoids protruding from the smooth, almost organic surface, covered the vehicle, giving it a look worryingly akin to pustules. Floating roughly half a metre off the ground, the blue tinge to the air below a sign of the use of A-Pods, the Araska was roughly forty metres wide, ten metres tall, and seventy metres long. The A-Pods seemed to be concentrated in larger rounded, armoured sections protruding from the hull somewhat, at each of the four corners. A single, capital grade laser gazed like a Cyclopean eye from the front, while triplets of Charge Beams were mounted over each of the A-Pod clusters. A multitude of lesser, anti personnel weapons clustered the hull.

"That's no tank," muttered Ken, in the last stages of terminal ecstasy. "That's a land battleship."

The Chief Engineer paused for a while, letting his audience soak in the spectacle. "The Araska is but the first, and the largest of the tanks of Project Daeva; with the experience gained from the construction of this unit, we hope to miniaturise the process to allow the Daeva-Process to be applied to tanks of the size of the modern Vreta. But I get ahead of myself. I'm sure that questions are being raised about what makes this tank so special. I'm sure that, from your perspective, all we have done is create a very light frigate. There may be some impressive miniaturisation, true, but there is nothing that seems to justify the bragging that I have been engaged in, seemingly deliberately alienating large amounts of the NEGA, along with two Ashcroft Projects."

There were, indeed, nods from the audience.

"What if I were to tell you that almost all of that bulk is armour? That the armour is superior to conventional materials, is self-repairing at rates incomparable to that which even the Seraph is capable of, and comes with pre-existing optical sensors that can, with very little effort, be re-purposed for military goals. That the Araska, though extensive use of automation and high grade military LAIs, only requires a crew of _nine_?"

There was general uproar in the hall.

"No..." muttered Ritsuko, in shock. "They wouldn't dare..."

"Yes, it's true. Project Daeva has accomplished a paradigm-changing event in the field ACXB; we have developed a functional, modular form of extra-dimensional organism which functions as regenerative armour. We call it... Type-S. It is lighter, harder and tougher than conventional materials," he continued, as the voices died away, triumph filling his voice. "Although the Daeva series of tank will be designed to maximise the advantages which the Type-S Armour provides, we believe that we will be able to design a variant which can be retrofitted onto capital ships, thus giving them a concrete military advantage over Migou ships of the same weight grade."

Dr Miyakame, on the next table along, blinked twice. "So, they did it..." he said softly.

"Welcome to a new era of warfare," Tokita said, staring out at the audience. "We hope it will be bought to an end _very_ quickly."

The light on the podium moved to a younger looking human male, in NEG naval uniform, his hair tucked neatly back, standing at the side of the room.

"Ladies and gentlemen, we will now take a short break. When we reconvene, there will be a demonstration of the Araska prototype, as well as questions from the floor."

The buzzing sussuration of conversation filled the vacuum.

Asuka stood up, and grabbed Shinji by the collar.

"Excuse me, Major Katsuragi," she said, smiling sweetly, "but may Shinji and I be excused? This man is just being pointlessly insulting, and I think the time would be spent more efficiently if I could show my co-worker Unit 02."

Misato flapped her hand in their general direction. "Sure. Just don't get in trouble or try to severely injure each other."

Asuka left, half-dragging Shinji by the arm, albeit in a way that wasn't recognisable as such unless you knew what you were looking for.

Misato smiled at Ritsuko, who had arrived just before the start of the speech, slightly out of breath. "See. I had some words with them, and they seem to be getting on better."

The blond woman stared at her, her expression dubious. "If you say so, but that's not what I saw." She turned in her seat to look at Toja and Ken. "That reminds me. I'm sorry, but you two don't have the security clearance to watch the next part of the demonstration, as it's quantitative, not qualitative. I'm afraid you'll have to leave the room. Just go talk to the woman waiting outside with the badge consisting of three linked squares. She'll show you to an entertainment room." Toja sat up immediately, but noting the reluctance in Ken's eyes, she added, with a glint in her eye, "Unless, of course, you'd report your observation of classified ACXB development to the OIS?"

That was enough to evict the two.

"So, anyway, Misato..." She noticed the other woman's gaze was not directed at her, but instead was over her shoulder. She turned, and her eyes immediately narrowed at the sight of Dr Miyakame, standing not a metre behind her chair, completely silent. His eyes looked just as cold as hers.

"Yes?" she asked, in an acidic tone.

"Dr Akagi. We need to talk. In private. Now."

~'/|\'~

It had been incredibly easy to get to the space where Unit 02 was being stored. Both Asuka, and, somewhat surprisingly Shinji, had arcology access granted at blood scanners to a number of surprisingly sensitive areas, including the series of stripped out bays in an Engel Project facility where the Evangelion was being stored.

Shinji stared up at the vast crimson shape, the red so dark as to be almost vermilion. The hangar was designed for much smaller biomechanical abominations against all human sense, and so Unit 02 knelt, hunched over in a way that almost made it look like it was giving itself in supplication to a higher power.

"Hmm," he stated, as he stepped into the shadow of the best, looking at it with an almost clinical eye. He'd seen the other two Units close up; for Unit 01, he'd even seen it without most of its outer shell, locked down by the restraint armour that left only a thin layer of biofoam between the creature underneath and an onlooker. "Four eyes instead of two. The head is a bit differently shaped. And those things on the shoulders?" He stared at the boxes, trying to evince their function. "Some kind of rocket pod thing, I think. Looks like the front opens up, certainly. Otherwise, it's pretty much the same as mine. Bar the colour. Did you get to choose it?"

Asuka glanced back at Shinji, as she walked towards her Evangelion. "What?"

"The colour. It's different."

She shot him a glance which spoke poorly of her view of his mental capacities. "That's only the base. The camouflage goes on top," Asuka explained, as if to a child. "It's only this colour so that the technicians can check for cracks in the top layer of plating."

"I know that," Shinji retorted. "Unit 01 is usually purple and green, but it doesn't actually fight like that. You'd have to be an idiot to send a war machine out like that; some kind of ignorant feudal knight." He thought for a moment. "Or a Nazzadi, I guess," he added, correcting himself.

"They do have a tendency to be a bit style over substance," Asuka stated. It was rather chilly in the hangar, actually, as the coolant that snaked in tubes wrapped around the Evangelion, not to mention the fact that the next hangar stored Seraph Engels in serried ranks, and the organisms liked the cold. So maybe the Nazzadi cut of the dress was leaving her chilly. But she would be damned if she was going to let him see that.

"The colour isn't the only difference, though," she continued. "After all, Units 00 and 01 are prototypes. They're just test models. That's why your one synchronised with someone who hadn't had any training."

Shinji couldn't let that one pass. "Yes, I certainly see why they'd want to cut that feature from the Mass Production Model. I mean, we wouldn't want for it to be _too_ easy to find suitable candidates. That would take all the fun out of it. No, what we really want is a war machine that's really hard to..."

"Shut up, idiot," Asuka replied, without turning her gaze from the sight of her Evangelion. "But Unit 02 is different."

"You mean it's really, really hard to synchronise with?" Shinji interjected. He was having surprising amounts of fun; certainly more than he would have had, staying in London-2 and sulking about the fact that his father was a better parent to a weird creepy White who writes odd notes in her room and is quite possibly crazy, than he was to his own son. Sniping at this volatile redhead was like shooting explosive barrels with a rocket launcher; the trick was to not get caught in the resultant explosion.

He had a sudden urge to join the Academy's Debating Society.

"I said, shut up, idiot," was the response that comment produced. "This is a true Evangelion, the first on Earth to be built for actual combat. The final model," she proclaimed, turning to face him with her arms spread out wide, eyes catching the light from the distant ceiling.

It was, Shinji had to admit, a stirring image.

~'/|\'~

The meeting had reconvened. They were taking questions from the floor.

Ritsuko elevated her hand.

"Ah, the famous Dr Ritsuko Akagi. I'm very glad to see that you're here," said Tokita, the Nazzadi speaker, with what was widely assumed to be insincerity despite the lack of any obvious inflections which would indicate its nature. "Please, go ahead."

"According to your initial speech, the Araska is equipped with a capital-grade D-Engine. How have you solved the instability issues which arise when the WEYL and RICCI tensor fluctuations induced by a D-Engine reach a critical density? Moreover, how will you prevent a dimensional rupture if the core of the Black Box is ruptured before the automated shutdown can fuse the confluence?"

"That's a very good question, and was in fact the second highest hurdle we had to overcome in the project. We solved it via a combination of advanced LAI handlers which can adjust the power flow to prevent a resonance cascade, which, yes, is a known problem if the WRT fluctuations become too dense, along with a distributed power grid which, using Unita and Xu's work on metastable dimensional taps, decreases WRT density by 21.8% over a conventional mono-engine. Moreover, by embedding the cell-source structure in the tissue of the arcanocyberxenobiological organism, its natural dampening abilities mean that a rupture should, we calculate, proceed along geometrical, not exponential rates, allowing the deadswitch to fuse the rupture. Should that situation arise, of course."

"But I would query the use of Unita and Xu's work on the grounds of safety issues," stated Ritsuko. "mD-Engines are still a theoretical prediction, and applying their work to a standard D-Engine is far too risky, in my opinion. And to deploy such a mD/D Hybrid-Engine into a weapon designed for close range ground combat invites the possibility of a localised metastable space-time collapse. I need not raise what happened _last_ time one of those occurred."

"And I would protest that the comparison of the mD/D Hybrid-Engine of the Araska to the events in Las Vegas is mere scaremongering," retorted Tokita. "If I were so inclined, I would perhaps raise that we should not be stationing a certain arcanocyberxenobiological organism so close to a city when the Evangelion Project has repeatedly refused requests from both the NEGA and the NEGN to reveal the source of the the extradimensional lifeform used as a template."

"Which is irrelevant to the subject at hand," shot back Ritsuko.

"Perhaps," the representative of Project Daeva stated, quite deliberately. "Nevertheless, such arguments have been raised multiple times in the development of the Araska, and have been noted."

"Stop it," muttered Misato to her colleague. "You're embarrassing yourself."

"Ah... you there, I'm sorry, I don't know your name," continued Tokita, waving aside any other points from Ritsuko, pointing at a female xenomix sitting on the Engel table.

"Opuly Ladislao, Sub-Director of ACXB Research, Project Engel," said the woman, who looked like she was one of the oldest xenomixes alive, in her mid twenties. "You accuse Project Evangelion of refusing to release data on the ACXB organisms used in their work, when you yourself refuse to permit other groups to examine the extra-dimensional organism used in Type-S plating. Do you not consider that hypocritical?"

"Not at all," he replied. "You, over there, on the NEGA table. No, the one on the right. No, my right, not yours." He sighed. "It would be lovely to have an absolute frame of reference."

There was a notable amount of laughter from the audience.

"Lieutenant Colonel Remi Obasanjo, New Earth Government Army. Project Daeva is a New Earth Government Navy pet project. How can you justify the production of tanks within the funding auspices set for Navy Special Weapons Projects?"

The engineer grinned widely. "Under the Auspice Protocol of 2076, void-capable and submersible craft are under the jurisdiction of the Navy. The Araska is both void-capable, and submersible. In truth, yes, the Araska can function as a super-light naval vessel as well as a super-heavy tank; Project Daeva does in fact have its roots in attempts to make the smallest vessel which could mount a capital grade weapon, before the innovation of Type-S plating. Later models will be more specialised for land warfare, subject to the ratification of the Daeva Project as a New Earth Government Project. They would then come under the command of the Army for operational purposes, with maintenance remaining with Project Daeva. As per the current arrangement with the Ashcroft Project Engel."

The woman smiled. The Army had heard what it needed to hear with that reply, which had removed their major objection to the Project. Now all that was left was to see if it would live up to all that it had promised.

"Next, please."

A Nazzadi woman stood up, on the same table. " Colonel Rury, of the NEGA Special Weapons Division. The Araska seems designed to challenge the eponymous products of Project Evangelion, and even if it was not, it is the only land unit within the same weight category. From observed data, how would the Araska fare against a Herald?"

The hall went silent. This was the question which everyone had been waiting for. That it had come from the NEGA SWD was not surprising, as the SWD was one of the major backers of Project Evangelion, and was, according to many members of the Navy, a hold-out of bipedalist favouritism.

"Well, firstly, I would disagree with your contention that the Araska is designed to compete with the Evangelions." The man smiled to himself. "It's designed to replace them."

There was a hiss of indrawn breath throughout the hall.

"Circumstances have seen us out on this, too. The most recent Herald, code-named Mot, was killed by the use of a Navy vessel and its ventral laser. True, an Evangelion may have been squeezing the trigger, so to speak, but the damage was done by brute force Direct Energy Transfer, not some special feature of the Evangelions."

Ritsuko sprung to her feet. "So the fact that the laser, powered by the _entire usable output_ of the L2 grid, was not able to breach the AT Field until the AT Field of Unit 00 neutralised the protective barrier somehow escaped your analysis?" she asked, as calmly as she could.

"No, it did not. However, it might have escaped _yours_ that the entire AT-Field of the Herald was concentrated in one point to stave off destruction. Which brings us to the other advantage of the Araska. We aren't reliant upon 'special candidates' and we don't need to use teenagers," the man spat, disgusted, "as child soldiers."

Misato winced. "It's a really good thing those two aren't here," she muttered to herself.

"We aren't dependent upon the unreliable human mind, which is fallible and prone to breaking, to deploy our war machines. Anyone could, with training, pilot the Araska or any of its planned successors. Since the start of your Project, you've found, what, three suitable candidates. We already have trained crew for _five_ Araska P-Types. Just from our test pilot program. So, to return to the original point, against a Herald, we know that brute force works. And we can bring a lot more of it to bear for a fraction of the cost."

He smiled, his grin blatantly patronising, at Ritsuko then.

"And it's inevitable that we will find a way to replicate the AT-Field. Science, whether conventional, arcane or sorcerous, will always find a way."

He pressed a button on the desk, and the lights dimmed, the wall behind him fading to transparency once again to show the bulk of the Araska.

"And now it is time for the demonstration." He paused. "Silence in the audience, please," he added, over Ritsuko's attempts to answer.

He flipped out a PCPU, dialling a number in a blatant act of showmanship.

"Hello? Yes, hello, Captain Wupata.... yes, yes, I'm fine. Listen, I have a little favour to ask. Would you mind telling your charming men and women to open fire. All together, please. Yes, thanks. No, really, I owe you one. Well, see you. _Ciao._"

He snapped the PCPU shut.

"Captain Wuptata. Wonderful guy. Known him for quite a while. Do you know, he heads an artillery company now?"

And with that, the shells hit. A full salvo from a company of M111-A2 Jaeger Self-Propelled Howitzers, the magnetically accelerated shells following a near-perfect parabola before slamming down as one into the hull of the Daeva. From the point of view of the audience, the sight was a horrific burst of sudden violence, the transparent wall behind the speaker showing fire and smoke. Shrapnel tore into the wall, leaving in off colour and opaque in areas.

There was utter silence in the hall, as the smoke cleared. You could have heard a pin drop.

The veils thrown up by the explosions parted, to leave the Araska. Its back had been flayed, torn open by the blasts, deep wounds torn into its hull by the barrage. But even as the audience watched, a black, tar-like substance welled up through the scars, filling them. Odd blisters floated in the tar, which glowed a strange luminescent green, even from that distance. The tar kept on swelling and bulging, bloating out of the wounds, even as the rate of expansion decreased, forming what looked like cancerous bulges on the hull. Even as they grew, though, a strange flaky layer, in military green, grew over the black, coating it; and where it coated, growth ceased. Within seconds the Daeva stood before them, not identical to how it was before, because there were new growths on the top, but intact.

There were panicked yelps from the audience at the sight, and two people were nosily sick.

"Lieutenant," Tokita called out, "are you all right in there?"

A face appeared on the wall behind him, the transparency becoming an opaque, moving image. The Hispanic man grinned.

"Bit noisy in here, but we're fine."

There was a burst of nervous laughter from the audience.

"Anything damaged?"

"Well, charge beam FR-2 took a direct hit from a shell. It's broken 'til we can take her in for a proper repair cycle."

"Damn," declared Tokita. "I'd said that I'd take her back unscratched. Looks like I owe the engineering team some drinks."

More nervous laughter.

"I'd just like to point out what just happened. The Araska took an entire company's worth of artillery shells. We timed it so that they hit as close to simultaneously as we could make it, just to put the self-repair functions of the ACXB organism to the limit. If they'd hit further apart, the damage could potentially have been repaired before the next shell hit, depending on spacing. The only permanent damage? One of the charge beams took a direct hit from an artillery shell, beyond the ability of the on-board nanofactories to repair. Now, let's run the Araska through her paces..."

~'/|\'~

The room was a vast sphere, shaped to atomic level precision. There were neither sharp angles nor shadows nor reflections anywhere in the man-made void. Such things could have disastrous consequences, for it had been found that the presence of sorcerous wards too close to this place disturbed the thing contained within.

The ABN Facility was a Grade-A facility. It was designed to hold things of such a level that their mere presence induced Aeon War Syndrome; ancient horrors spoken of in myth, entities which induced AWS in the Migou, things which would not die, would not sleep and should not exist. Those true horrors of the universe which mankind had encountered (or, in its worst moments, made) were sealed here, undying and restless. Was it any surprise that the Auburn district, on the edge of New Chicago, in which it was located, was viewed as a hell-hole slum by the NEG as a whole, a place where cultists gathered, and extra-dimensional beasts were attracted, before the near-absolute military lockdown around the place terminated them? Where the AWS score of the inhabitants was a good two to three points higher than average for the population? Where children were sometimes born with Outsider taint through no fault of their parents, and the parapsychic rate was nine times that of the ambient population?

Of course, a cynic could say that characteristic made it useful, made it worth keeping so close to a population centre.

But legally, Vault-H2 did not exist. The thing contained here exceeded what the highest grade storage facility acknowledged by the NEG was permitted to keep. If the Migou knew that humanity had it, their galactic empire would have been stirred into action, the countless masses of their hive worlds thrown against Earth to wipe it out, regardless of the consequences. If the Rapine Storm and the Death Shadows had known that the NEG had it, they would have done anything to secure its release. If the Dagonites knew that mankind had it, they would have thrown away all their lives and their search for the sunken city of their master to ensure that it was ended.

Only two members of the New Earth Government Cabinet knew of the existence of the ABN facility in any detail. No member of the New Earth Government Cabinet knew that Vault-H2 existed. The number of people 'in the know' could be counted in the low double digits, and almost all of them were servants or members of AHNUNG. The others were believed by AHNUNG to belong to it.

Ryoji Kaji stood on the platform that wrapped its way around the equator of the interior of the sphere, in a full-body glowsuit which cast no shadow. No flesh was exposed; the internal air supply was designed to only last for three and a half minutes, to limit exposure to the threat within the Vault. The air, thick and heavy from the 3 atmosphere pressure of pure helium weighed down on him almost as much as what he was about to do. As an inspector certified by the Ashcroft Foundation; in reality, AHNUNG, as the guards of this containment sphere were compromised from the very beginning, he was tasked with the inspection of the contents of Vault-H2.

He was in here alone. Mental proximity to the thing sealed within usually produced Late Onset Aeon War Syndrome within minutes. The air limit was just an artificial means of controlling exposure. But Kaji had been chosen by AHNUNG because of his observed resilience to Aeon War Syndrome; the selection for this mandatory check on Vault-H2 had come about after the Ballydehob Incident and the deployment of VREES in clean-up. Just another incident where the VREES selection criteria had produced agents for AHNUNG with extreme tenacity.

The duty was simple. A pathway would be extended half-way to the inner sphere, which would be opened. The agent would observe that the physical manifestation of the entity remained within the seal, quiescent. The agent would mark this as affirmative, the inner seal would be resealed, and the agent would be extracted, for examination of mental well being and for signs of cellular taint from proximity.

It was completely impossible for someone to release the entity. Not only would they have to pass the fifty metre gap between the end of the walkway, and the inner seal where the entity was contained, but if someone got that close, the entity would crush their mind through its presence. It was anathema to humanity, not through malevolence (though it had that, boundless reserves of vitriol which could transmute the oceans and consume the land), but simple _otherness_. And even then, the security watched everything that happened in this dome, each watcher vigilant for, unlike a human being, the Panoptican Limited Artificial Intelligences could view this place without breaking. They were sentient, but not sapient. And even if all that could be subverted, the wards that wrapped around the facility at a safe distance would trigger if the entity tried to escape; they would be rent asunder by its presence, true, but they would fulfil their role and raise the alarm.

Vault-H2 was impregnable.

Unless AHNUNG had been pushed into selecting this very special agent by another player in the game, without them even knowing it. Unless that agent had been chosen by the other player because they were able to resist the taint of the First. Unless the Panoptican LAIs could be subverted by an external source, backdoors opened into their sealed network at the time of the construction of the Vault, only exploitable by the three most powerful super-computers on the planet. Unless the agent had been provided with a piece of valued and arcane technology stolen from the alien and ultimately unknowable Tsab, their mastery of dimensional pockets brute forced out of a stolen device by the crude techniques of human sorcery, which would permit the entity to be concealed by a thief, hidden outside the normal five dimensions.

Unless the Soul of the Outer Gods willed all of this to happen.

_a discontinuity_

And Kaji was in the inner seal, already flipping open the hidden compartment in the briefcase that the man in London-2 had provided him with. Obsidian black and a yellow gemstone with angles which were _wrong_ which glowed with a sick internal light stared out at him, seemingly the eye of some malign intellect. All around it, the interior of the compartment bore its repeating, interlocking motif, of an asymmetric, five-branched tree-like shape.

The Elder Sign.

Kaji reached out a gloved hand.

_Now comes the hard part,_ he thought.

_I think it goes "morituri nolumus mori"..._

~'/|\'~

And in the unfathomable, unspeakable depths that were neither _here_ nor _there_, but were instead _other_, something stirred.

Its lord and master called, and unlike the other faithless servants, who followed the traitor who had supplanted the true Hierophant, it was still loyal.

And so the elect called to it, and it would obey.

It wanted to.

~'/|\'~


	11. Chapter 9: Yam Strikes!

**Chapter 9**

Yam Strikes!

~'/|\'~

The alarms began to scream in geological monitoring stations all across the planet. These places had an even more important role in the Aeon War; orbital bombardment would show up, just as earlier nuclear tests had, if the Migou were ever to escalate the war. They also functioned, on the instruction of the GIA, as watchtowers for any possible sign that the antediluvian Valusians might awaken. Those sapient reptilian creatures, to the dinosaurs as humanity itself is to the mammals, were thought to be long extinct. However, certain of their facilities had been found in the construction of the various geocities that now dotted the globe, in tectonically stable regions of the planet, staffed by automated systems watching over cyrogenic pods. Although no awake Valusians had ever been encountered (barring those individuals from the pods who were shipped off to labs, to be interrogated and vivisected), and although the discoveries had not been made public, the Valusians were now viewed as a potential threat. There was no desire, after all, for _another_ side to join the Aeon War.

The reason for their alarm, though, was not so critical. They were detecting an earthquake, which, as the network which connected these facilities linked up their data and fed it through the processor Limited AIs, appeared to be shallow, and producing movement directly above the epicentre calculated to be categorised as a VII on the Modified Mercalli Scale.

Of course, the worry increased when it was noted that the epicentre was directly below Lake Michigan. And that was a concern, because there shouldn't be any tectonic activity in that location. Considering the proximity of such a site to the centre of government for the entire New Earth Government, there was a mass collective grabbing of secure telephones and hurried use of the emergency number to the local military.

The water purity facilities on Lake Michigan were having their own problems, of course. Quite apart from the fact that the sides of the lake were caving in, as the water impossibly swelled, flooding the flat land around it, the temperature of the water was rising precipitously, currents of heated water flowing up from the bottom of the lake. In the wild ideas thrown around by the local scientists and engineers trying to explain _what the hell was going on_, suggestions of a precision Migou strike against the mantle, creating a volcano by punching through the Earth's surface, were thrown about. These made their way back to the NEG military, where they matched a low probability prediction for how a Migou limited scale bombardment would begin.

Global threat levels were raised to Code Sigma to deal with the possibility that the Migou had begun orbital bombardment, with a resultant rise in the latitude for deployment of nuclear weapons. Across the world, forces moved to high alert. This build up was noted by the Migou, who began moving reserve forces forwards, from their fortified stationary bunkers they occupied on Earth as well as dispatching extra Swarm Ships from the Hive Ship in orbit. This fed back into the NEG, as the actions of the Migou raised the LAI estimates of this being a serious offensive.

Global threat levels were raised to Code Tau.

This activity looped into the Migou hierarchy, who noted that human military behaviour conformed to their predictions for a suicidal last stand, by their predictions of the psychology of those uplifted apes. As a result, they took activities to remedy that, making sure that victory would occur, despite the costs.

Global Threat Levels were raised to Code Upsilon.

A cascade of worry flowed through the machinery of the New Earth Government, slowing the cogs as the ruling authorities of humanity collectively turned their thoughts to the possibility that this was the way that the world would end; not, as the poet had said, with a whimper, but with a bang.

Fear and panic began to fill the air when, despite the attempts to calm the situation, only desolation and despair could be foreseen. The spy satellite tasked to study this phenomenon reported a Code Blue STE Rift. At the revelation that a Herald appeared, contrary to all previous predictions, to be launching a direct assault on the New Earth Government capital, it was feared that all the plans and contingencies that had been sown in preparation for a Migou assault since the Fall of Alaska in 2085 would now be swept away, quite literally, by whatever this new Herald was doing.

Control was reasserted. Humanity would refuse to let go. Globally the level of alert was lowed, even as all forces which could be spared in North America converged on Chicago-2

The presence of one of the Heralds of the Outer Gods was noted, too, by the Migou. The fungoid Yuggothians re-evaluated the situation. The reactions of the mammals below were re-examined in that light, and found to be consistent with previous behaviour. However, after the loss of two entire fleets by the treachery of the humans and the twice-traitor Nazzadi, it was decided that they would not be able to tolerate the losses from an assault on a location so close to the human capital, while retaining enough force to euthanise the monster that had just woken. However, they could not also permit such an entity to roam free, for it could wake the Hierophant, which would be a direct strike against their federation. Orbital bombardment was considered, and rejected, for the risks of such force against this planet were calculably high.

And so the Migou hung on the edge, unable to act, but also unable to let what would happen occur.  
They hoped that the hominids would achieve the improbable again, for it was the lesser of two evils.

A decision was made by the sorcerer-scientists, the leaders of the Migou fleet. They began a notable withdrawal from their gains across North America, hoping that the uplifted apes would spare more troops for what must be done, loathe as were to give up territorial gains.

Of course, they left the extensive minefields and automated defences in place. It would be stupid to left the humans just waltz in to what they had sacrificed lives to gain.

~'/|\'~

The Herald, which the NEG naming convention so inaccurately called "Yam" paused slightly, as it tore through the wall that it had built, extending the gift of Yog-Sothoth, through the lacuna in what the limited beings that inhabited this world (with the exclusion of one native species) called reality. Hot water flooded through, rich in noxious chemicals and hydrocarbons, as it ceased its relentless assault on what kept it from its target destination, thick and dark currents swirling in the chill autumnal waters of Lake Michigan.

Its intellect was alien; it had last been upon this ball of iron and silicates before the Elder Things had lost control of their autonomous amorphous construction devices, and it had been aware all the time since. It had aeons upon aeons of experience in the seas of billions of planets much superior to this one, untainted by the annoyingly reactive gas that polluted and permeated this planet through unrestrained pollution by chemical factories.

And so it thought.

_**third|tertiary|inner iron|silicate|miscellaneous residence|dwelling|territory  
disgust|disappointment|loathing ineptitude|lack-of-forethought|laziness starfish|inferior|xeno because|correlation|link solvent|water|fluid vile|polluted|toxic gas|reactive|eighth!  
second|hierophant|traitor held|possessive|indicating-ownership residence|dwelling|home|territory  
intrusion|impolite|offensive? dangerous|threat-to-life|risky?  
possible|potential|mid-to-high.  
necessary|needed|desire!  
puppet|marionette|projection being|possessive|indicating-existence first|dead|rightful-hierophant local|present|resident-not-indicating-possessive now-time|now-space|all-dimensions!  
necessary|complete|desire!  
puppet|marionette|projection request|desire|need-indicating-other assistance|servitude|completion-of-oath!  
self|ego|entity loyal|kin|vizier! negation|impossible|clarity traitor|rebel|fool!  
servitude|oath|being necessary|mandated|desired!**_

Its path was clear. It tore through the barrier in full, the alien waters of where it had slept pouring through, volume upon volume, supplanting the inferior native ecology. Its lesser children had come with it, too, and they would sing their beautiful songs, a choir of seraphim for an angel upon high, chosen of the Outer Gods.

It spread the beauteous gift of That Which Defines Time And Space wide. Its children could huddle under its auspices, protected from the malign vicissitudes of an alien, hostile, inferior, locally and freakishly stable set of universal so-called-constants.

And the bulk of the Herald passed through the hole in space, that would take it from its home to where it would need to be.

_**self|ego|entity prediction|being|statement enjoy|pleasure|emotion state|future|soon!**_

~'/|\'~

Sirens began to wail throughout the Engel silo, the high-pitched scream of urgency deliberately akin to that of a crying infant, as a pleasant, hermaphroditic Limited Artificial Intelligence voice began to issue commands over the loud speakers.

"All Engel pilots cleared for deployment are to report to their attuned vehicle, ready for immediate deployment. This is a Gaghiel-level order; this is a Gaghiel-level order. A massive extra-dimensional entity is in close proximity to the Chicago Arcology. This is not a drill; this is not a drill. All Engel pilots cleared for deployment are to report..."

This cacophony was also broadcast into the converted Engel bays that held the kneeling Unit 02, and the two teenagers.

Shinji looked around. "What's going on? Are we meant to be here?"

"...this is a Gaghiel-level order. A massive extra-dimensional entity is in close proximity to the Chicago Arcology. This is..."

Asuka sighed at that comment, even as her eyes lit up. "Idiot. It's almost certainly a Herald." She smiled to herself. "A real one..."

"Then why don't they just tell their Engel pilots that?" Shinji asked.

Her eyes locked onto his for a moment, before leaving in disgust, to rest upon her Evangelion. "Because the Heralds themselves are classified. Well, not that there are large extra-dimensional creatures, but their nature, and that they're part of a linked phenomenon. Honestly. Don't you ever watch the news?" She waved a hand at him. "No, don't answer that."

"What should I do?" Shinji said to himself, ignoring her. He turned to the exit. "I need to get back to Misato."

Asuka made a small noise of disgust. He was getting rather sick of that; just being around her was giving him a headache from the litres of scorn poured down upon him.

"And do what?," she asked. "As far as I can recall, your Evangelion is both on the other side of the Atlantic and out of operations right now. So unless you're going to spontaneously manifest Grade-3 Somatic Teleportation, nothing you will do will matter." She paused. "Are you a parapsychic, by the way? You're not wearing the marks, but that just means you don't have Dee or Eye powers."

Shinji shook his head. "No. You?"

"No. I just like to know."

"Well, then, what do you want to do?" he asked, sarcasm creeping into his voice despite his certain knowledge that it would only make matters worse. "I mean, after all, you're the..."

She was already striding off towards a set of lockers, near to the feet of the Evangelion.

Asuka was finding this boy rather frustrating. He was so... passive. And not even passive in the "sit there and do nothing unless prompted" way; no, he insisted on arguing with her, even when he wasn't coming up with anything helpful, and making comments that she was sure that he thought were funny, even when anyone with a functioning brain could see that they were the product of a mind that thought it has a much better sense of humour than it actually did. She was sure that he shouldn't be like that. He was causing a minor headache, and it would be nice if he'd just do what he was told to.

She put it out her mind, as she headed over to the lockers, planting her hands flat on the memoform surface, which read her hand prints then shaped itself into handles, to allow her to open it. She pulled out a sausage-shaped bag, in the same deep red as the kneeling forty-metre figure beside her.

"Wait there for a second," she commanded, stepping behind one of the legs of Unit 02 for some privacy, as she began pulling the plug-suit out of her bag and stripping off her dress.

_At least the plug suit will be a lot warmer than this thing,_ Asuka thought. _Important lesson learnt; Nazzadi dresses are not to be worn outside of arcologies or Nazza-Duhni itself. Right, so underlayer first..." _as she pulled out a thin black garment which looked most like a full length wetsuit.__

The underlayer was one of the personal changes she had persuaded the Berlin team to implement in the design of the plug-suit. The original design had been fine if you were to only wear it in the entry plug, where the neutral buoyancy and the lack of movement were fine, but she had quickly found that it tended to leave skin raw at the joints if you walked around in it. It appeared that whoever had designed the plug-suit had cared far more about optimising the design so that it could generate the highest possible synchronisation ratios than about petty things like comfort. The scientists in Berlin-2 had waved aside her complaints, until she had pointed out, in a patronising tone, that she couldn't focus on moving the Evangelion as her body if her real skin was hurting from a badly designed suit.

She had been seven at the time.

There was a movement of feet from the other side of the Evangelion's leg. Obviously, the idiot was just going to ignore what she'd told him to do. Honestly, why wouldn't people just do what they were told?__

"Peek, and I _will_ beat you senseless," she called out, not even looking up from where she was sealing the smart material up the legs.

Shinji quite believed that. He'd moved around to see what she was doing, because she hadn't deigned to tell him, and caught a glimpse of her before she'd done up the top of the black thing that she seemed to wear under her plug suit. Asuka was very fit, in both the formal and colloquial senses of the word; she was built like an athlete with (from the brief glance he had obtained) almost no superfluous fat.

_Wow..._

He waited.

Asuka did up the neck seal, a slight hiss echoing through the chamber as the secondary seal rotated into place, shaking out her hair and pulling it behind her. She checked that the A10 clips were properly in position, flat against the scalp.

_Yes._

She stretched out, right up to her maximum height (she wondered idly if her father had been tall; her mother certainly had been), then rotated her neck in a circle, clicking her knuckles together.

"Asuka, let's go," she said softly to herself, her voice level, calm, and filled with determination.

She reached down into the bag as she came out from behind the leg of Unit 02, noting that Shinji had his back turned, in what she judged to quite possibly be a sign of guilt.

She punched him hard, in the arm.

He yelped, and clutched at his limb, jumping away from her.

"What the hell was that for!" he yelled at her in Japanese reflexively.

"Looking," was the answer he got, in the same language. Asuka noted the slight flush, as well as the lack of protest.

_So he did peek. Thought so._

She hit him again, in the same place.

"Stop that!" he moaned. "It was an accident. You didn't tell me what you were..."

"Put this on," she instructed him, a spare plug-suit in her arms. "You're coming with me on this."

"What are you, crazy!" he shouted back, clutching at his arm. "You can't just hit people and make them do what you say!"

Asuka tensed momentarily, moving her arm slightly, watching him flinch and recoil away. It amused her. "You're wrong. The whole of human society is based on a mixture of that and tribe-level altruism."

"What are you talking about!"

"Put this on."

"It won't fit," protested Shinji. "I'm taller than you."

"You're not," Asuka replied, their eyes level. Generations of good diet combined with mild sexual selection had resulted in a slight decrease in human sexual dimorphism with regards to height, which, combined with the difference in ethnicities, meant that she was in fact slightly taller than he was.

"... and... shaped differently," he continued, making vague gestures at about chest level with his hands.

"You'll survive. It'll just be a bit loose around the chest. Just do what I say and put this on."

"And tight somewhere else," he said acidly.

"You'll be fine. Just do what I say and put it on."

"Uh uh." Shinji shook his head. "There is no way you're going to make me wear that."

~'/|\'~

Commander Matthew Martensson, of the NES _Blade of Athena_, a Triumph-Class Destroyer, rushed into the bridge burrowed deep into the middle of the ship, his blond mane clearly ungroomed. The wail of sirens greeted him, as well as a clamour from his subordinate officers.

"Report!" he snapped at his First Mate, all traces of his normal good humour gone.

"We're under attack from... something," Kagamy stated, red eyes cool and steady. "Global threat levels pinged recently up to Upsilon; they're back down to Tau, but we received coded orders for a Grade VII."

The Commander swallowed hard, a flash of worry in his somewhat bloodshot blue eyes. "They were unsealed and the authorisation codes checked?" he asked, trying to keep his voice as level as hers.

"Yes, sir. They checked out."

Both of them knew what a Code VII meant.

"Well, have there been any signs of a Migou strike yet? What does Comms say about troop movements?" Matthew said, while authorising his command of the ship as he took the central chair.

"Negative," called Lieutenant Tonaka, over from the AR screen that even now flared massive amounts of sensory information. Communications Officers on a capital ship were a rare breed, required to handle massive amounts of sensory information. Most of them as a result came from AR gaming sub-cultures, to the extent that they came with pre-existing permanent hard AR contacts. They tended not to blink much. "In fact," a new window was maximised with a series of hand movements, "they appear to be retreating... oh. Turquoise message from NEGNC C2. Beyond my clearance. Forwarding it to central desk."

The Commander read the document that the High Command had just felt like issuing. It was short, and rather unhelpful, yet still contained a potent revelation. He blinked, heavily, then authorised the unlocking of the censored version to his senior crew.

"Short version," he said, staring around the bridge. Everyone was in position; all posts filled. "An exceedingly dangerous extra-dimensional lifeform has appeared in close proximity, somewhere in Lake Michigan. Satellite recon cannot give us more precise details; it appears to have some kind of some kind of..." he paused, "I can't believe I'm saying this. Some kind of massive force field slash arcane shield, that makes it impossible to be more accurate. No known attributes, although it does note that the entity will probably be able to take multiple shots from capital grade weapons. We are to kill it, and prevent it from reaching Chicago-2. I don't need to tell you why."

"Well, that was useful," called out one of the Sensor Officers. "Nothing more, sir? Even a profile what we should be looking for."

Commander Martensson sighed. "No." he replied, rubbing his eyes as he reached to authorise a combat stimulant to wake him up properly. "Damn useless OCI", he muttered to himself as an aside.

His hand never reached the button, as the consoles all around the room began to scream. The AR projection of the fleet bloomed in red, as one, then a second icon flashed to the "Destroyed" status.

"Report!"

"The _Cybele_ is going down!" stated his First Officer, Kagamy, her voice as calm as ever. "The _Mithras_ has not sighted the target."

"Damn it", Matthew swore. "Commodore Clarke was on the _Cybele_. What the hell is going on!"

"Vice-Admiral Xu has taken command, from C2 Fleet Command," reported Tonaka. "Patching him through to main speakers."

"This is Vice-Admiral Xu, of the New Earth Navy," the message came from, the man's voice that slightly metallic buzz that came from the massive levels of encryption used on Fleet channels. "All ships, check distance between ships. Take evasive manoeuvres, and elevate yourself from the water. I want those ventral weapons pointing downwards!"

Commander Martensson nodded. "Right, Helm." He switched to the ship-board announcement system. "This is Martensson. All hands to F-Suits and acceleration couches."

All across the ship, there was a buckling of clasps, as the crew prepared for flight mode. Most merely strapped into their acceleration couches at their battle stations, which kept them bound whatever the alignment of the ship, while those who had to move got into their F-Suits, stripped down, void-capable powered suits, designed for use even in zero-g conditions, with magnetic boots and their own integral A-Pods, enabling them to move around the ship.

"We have a clear for preparation," announced the officer at the Helm. "Permission to take her up?"

"Permission granted," said the Commander. "Let's get clear of this water and get revenge for the _Cybele_."

~'/|\'~

All across the lake, New Earth Government ships were breaking the water, vast volumes of water pouring off their flanks as they rose into the air. These ships were rather different in appearance to their ancestors, those ships which had been limited to the surface of the water. Modern naval ships were roughly cylindrical; vast cigars covered in protrusions in the form of missile pods, direct-fire weapons, point defence and sensor equipment. The ships with a carrier role were bulbous and curved, pregnant with offspring that they could vomit forth onto their foes, while the dedicated warships were sleek and knife-like, their front sections designed to reduce the surface area they exposed while their lethal ventral weapons were aligned with a target. The bridge was nested deep within the superstructure of the vessel, though its nerves and senses spread throughout the whole ship, so that a lucky shot or an enemy fighter on a kamikaze run could decapitate the command structure. The old balance between "weapons of war" and "weapons of terror" had been raised, and it has been decided that what made a weapon really terrifying was the ability to kill you as efficiently and as quickly as possible while taking the least possible damage.

They were more kin, in design, to submarines than surface ships, as the advent of the A-Pod opened the prospect of true three-dimensional battles at sea. Against the Migou, concealment below the waves was an advantage, because the heavy weapons on Swarm Ships, which outgunned even a Victory-Class Battlecruiser, could not be fired properly in such an environment. Against the Esoteric Order of Dagon, the opposite was true; to face them below the waves allowed them to bring the best of their assets into play, while above it they were notably deficient in things which could hit aircraft, or indeed anything which could deal with a capital-grade ship. What was being done now was a standard tactic against aquatic foes. They could only hope that the Herald would stay there.

The clouds broke above them, autumn sunlight poring through the gaps in the sky to light up the emerging behemoths. The matt paint and pseudodermal layers of absorbent memo-material, designed to minimise visibility and radio signature gave them an almost toy-like look, like some cheap plaything for infants, designed to reduce choking hazard. From above, the scene looked almost faked, like tiny scale models in some ancient science-fiction show with a poor budget and a lead actor with a toupee. That was irrelevant. Efficient design should always override aesthetics, according to the doctrine of the New Earth Navy. And with modern flesh vat-growth techniques, toupees were a thing of the past.

The Herald, of course, neither knew any of this, nor would it have cared had it deigned to tear the structure of the organic composite matrix these strange creatures, which lived in an atmosphere comprised of a deadly toxin, used to cognate (insofar as they could do that) from its protective casing, and find out how to extract the information it desired. With a flick of its tail, it drove itself through a network of mines, the charges detonating harmlessly on the surface of the AT-Field, displacing vast quantities of water which surged upwards to plume on the surface.

The Limited Artificial Intelligences installed on the New Earth Government vessels noted this pattern, and calculated the velocity and depth of the object which was causing the explosions in about as much time as the humans controlling them took to notice the blossoming explosions. These were independently verified over a tight-band combat network with the other ships, and corrections made through statistical analysis of the data points observed by each separate vessel. When they were satisfied, insofar as a non-sapient system could feel any emotion, they informed the organic beings in their chain of command of the extrapolated position of the Herald. In a show of dreadful inefficiency, it took the humans several seconds to request permission from the commanders of their ships, then give the command to fire.

A veritable shower of torpedoes descended from the elevated ships, falling as projectiles before impacting with the water and their engines activating. Explosions cascaded along all sides of the Herald's AT-Field, unable to penetrate the warped spacetime, the phase space of possible results of the explosion turned against them. However, a surprising number missed, the telemetry sent back to their ships reporting that the target was not where it had been calculated to be, and that local conditions in the water were different from what they should have been. Error reports blossomed on the feed-outs from a non-negligible percentage of the weapons, informing their operators of impossibilities, of water that did not act like water and other such things.

And the Herald itself was not passive in its effect in causing confusion. The surface of the lake bulged up, unbelievably, engulfing a low hanging frigate in a very final way. Something could be seen in that pustule of water which defied all human knowledge of fluid dynamics, a colossal, corpse-white shape which moved like some leviathan from the Permian.

Anyone who made such a comparison would be wrong, though. The Herald was considerably older than that; that era was long after this insignificant planet had become inhospitable for it and its kind after the run-away atmospheric pollution induced by the irresponsible genetic tampering of the Elder Things, and, anyway, life of terrestrial origin in the Permian had not advanced to the level where it could support such a thing. It could never support a creature of that magnitude; it never had, and never would. The laws of nature state that such a beast could never come about; the mass scales up faster than the muscle strength, even in an environment where fluid buoyancy would permit it to become larger, while the forces which its movement would subject its body to should tear it in half.

It was just as well that the favour of the Gods gave the Herald sanctity against the arbitrary declarations of this place.

The water surged again, the white shape devouring a destroyer, its path taking it towards the metal boxes which the odd creatures hid within, taking them away to be assumed for its greater glory and that of its children.

But always, inexorably, taking it closer to Chicago-2.

~'/|\'~

Shinji was grumbling to himself, even as the entry plug flooded with LCL.

"How did she make me do this? I honestly don't know why."

He shifted, uncomfortably, trying to loosen it around his groin. His prediction that it would not fit there was proving painfully accurate.

"Stop complaining," Asuka told him, as the fluid reached neck height. "Sit behind me, and keep your hands to yourself."

The unpleasant moment when your lungs scream at you that they're filled with fluid, and that you're drowning, and the feeling of the viscous LCL washing over against your eyeballs passed, for both of them.

Shinji shuddered, once he had got the panic instinct under control. Asuka, he noted, didn't react to it at all. The LCL tasted... wrong; not like how it normally was. The only component he could recognise in the LCL of Unit 01 was something like, but not quite, the metallic taste of blood, but there was something else here, some indescribable yet very familiar taste that hovered right at the edge of his tongue

_How long has she been doing this if she doesn't have a problem with drowning?_

He made a face. "Your LCL tastes different."

Asuka grunted, as she ran the beginnings of the start-up procedure. "Really." It wasn't a question, and there was a notable hint that any use of that as a criticism would result in conflict.

"Where do the Evangelions store the LCL, anyway?" he wondered out loud, more as way of changing the subject than out of interest. "Is there some internal reservoir or something?"

A one-shouldered uni-shrug was all he got in response.

"What is is, anyway?" he wondered. "Why don't they just use impact gel and sealed helmets, like I've heard that the Engels..."

The red-haired girl turned to glare at him, her hair waving like seaweed in the viscous orange liquid. "Stop babbling and complaining. Unless you'd like to run the start-up procedure... which you can't, anyway, as you haven't even done independent operations yet, then you can shut up while I need to concentrate." Shinji shut up.

The start-up procedure continued, until the screens that surrounded them, on the inside of the entry plug, degenerated into red warnings screaming that something was wrong.

"Have you tried turning it off and on again?" asked Shinji, innocently.

Another glare was his payment for them. "What are you, stupid? Are you trying to be annoying? You're making mental noise, which is disturbing the calibration. I told you not to disturb me!"

"So you don't think it might be because two people are in a war-machine only designed for one, and it's controlled by thought? That maybe _two people aren't meant to be in an Evangelion entry plug_?" he continued, in the same tone of voice.

"No," replied Asuka, taking on a similarly saccharine tone, "because I already accounted for that. For one, you're not even wearing A10 Nerve Clips, which means that any motive force you provide will be minimal. No, this is a higher level function."

"That doesn't explain anything, you know." The conversation was getting worryingly polite.

She sighed. "Of course. What language do you think in?"

Shinji frowned. "Mostly... well, I'm not even sure about that. Sometimes in Japanese, sometimes in English."

"Yes," said Asuka, poking at the screen at the front, "that _would_ explain it. Idiot. LAI, add language slash Japanese slash standard to the active dictionary."

"Are you sure that you want to change the default language settings? Some systems may need to restart for the changes to take effect," asked the onboard voice.

"Yes. Change language then restart."

The lights in the entry plug dimmed, then came back up, the complicated flickering of the walls proceeding without interruption this time.

"Evangelion Unit 02; activate!"

Shinji groaned. That girl was giving him a headache.

~'/|\'~

The conference centre where they had been showing off the Daeva had been evacuated remarkably quickly, a considerable number of the people in the room taken directly to one of the command centres buried into the superstructure of the Chicago Arcology. The resident members of the OIS were already considering the possibility that the command structure had been compromised by cult influences, to arrange for so many high ranking members of the New Earth Army and Navy to be focussed in one place. They had watched the surge in global threat levels, after what was found to be a simple mistake ballooned into reports of Migou orbital bombardment, and attempts to clamp down on the scaremongering and misunderstandings had originated from this location.

Major Misato Katsuragi stood in a corner, and watched. She was significantly outranked here, and nothing yet could justify her involvement. She half suspected that she had only been escorted here by accident in the chaos. And if she could trust Asuka's PsychEvals, she was probably going to start up Unit 02 and try to help, without permission. She'd already gone off with Shinji to show him her Evangelion (that sounded dirty in her head), so she's wouldn't even need to go very far to get there. This had the potential to go very wrong.

A sussuration of whispers began to fill the room...

"A Herald?"  
"A Code Blue?"  
"A Herald?"  
"Code Blue?"  
"Seriously?"

... and at that cue, she straightened up. She really wished that Ritsuko was here, as together they would have backed up the viewpoint of Project Evangelion from both a tactical and scientific point of view, but the blond-haired woman had disappeared with Dr Miyakame immediately after he had come over to talk to her.

Yes, that was most suspicious. Ritsuko loathed him, Misato was sure; she had heard enough rants, but the way she had crumpled and acquiesced to his request for a talk was quite unlike how she normally was. It was worth looking into, certainly.

_And, hey,_ Misato thought, _if they do start sleeping together or something, we might be able to borrow some of the Engel technicians for an armour redesign, and ours are suffering from the constant damage which the Evas keep on suffering. It's an ill wind that doesn't have a silver lining, or something like that._

The Major stepped forwards.

"Project Evangelion offers its assistance, subordinate to main NEG command," she stated to the Vice-Admiral who seemed to have taken charge.

The naval officer, a hardened-looking man in his early fifties, of Chinese ethnicity, glanced over at her. "Aren't all of your assets on the other side of the Atlantic?" he said, bluntly. An aide leaned over and whispered in his ear. "Ah. You have one here."

The Major nodded. "It was here for a full test of its technical capacity, before it was moved over to join the others. And before you ask, sir," she continued, seeing the glint in his eye, "Unit 02 is complete and has already seen battle on the Eastern European Front. It personally took down two Migou Swarm Ships," she added, with a hint of pride.

"We have multiple impacts from the simultaneous torpedo barrage... nothing," called out an officer, from the other side of the room. "Not a damn thing."

"Vice-Admiral," the Major pointed out, "remember that it took the _Ashcroft_ three over-charged shots from its main plasma cannon to take down the AT-Shield of the one code-named "The Kathirat", and even then it failed to kill the target, only crippling it. And it took all the spare capacity of L2 to power the laser that killed Mot." She took a deep breath. "And with all due respect, sir, as long at the Herald stays under water, we can't use the ventral plasma cannons on the destroyers against it, and the ventral lasers on the frigates aren't powerful enough."

"What are you leading up to, Major Katsuragi?" growled the Vice-Admiral.

"Permission to mobilise Unit 02, and tactical battlefield control over it. We should station it by C2, as a last line of defence."

Elements on the AR display in the middle of the room flashed red.

"That was the _Southampton_," called out an officer. "Another frigate lost."

"The torpedo bombers are coming around for another swing," called out another. "They're going to have to rearm after this strike."

"WQS reports massive environmental disturbance. The water is becoming toxic; there's a current flow from where that thing appeared. Sats say that it seems to be some kind of space-time rift, and it's growing."

Vice-Admiral Xu sighed. "Permission granted. I still don't approve of the use of child soldiers, but we need everything we can get, and the Evas have a record of killing Heralds. Use that station over there for TacCom; get it deployed in Sector 4." He snorted. "The Araska's in Sector 3. Who'd have thought at the start of the day that we'd get to see a direct comparison?"

"I'd have preferred not to," called the Brigadier who was trying to co-ordinate the air forces so that they'd do something. He wasn't having much luck. The weapons that a bomber mounted weren't scratching the hide of the beast, unable to even get through the AT-Field. And they weren't prepared to go nuclear in these circumstances, with already elevated tensions with the Migou and how close the entity was to the capital.

~'/|\'~

Kaji stepped outside, in a casual walk which he had been explicitly trained in. He was feeling rather light headed. Something red flashed in front of his eyes; he blinked, and it was gone.

He shook his head. He now had what was quite possibly the most valuable thing on the planet in his suitcase, folded into its own pocket dimension by the reality-breaking _Bah'ri Diß_ artefact. If he was caught with this because he fainted after _that_, well, he didn't want to think about what would happen to him. Bad things, probably starting with a TSEAP and moving upwards from there. And vivisection did not appeal to him, all things considered.

He managed to make his way to the train, without showing any sign of weakness, and slumped heavily down in his seat, eyes listlessly staring out the window at nothing.

And as the train departed, something felt him go, and wailed.

~'/|\'~

Commander Martensson was not having a good day. At all. The light frigates, the only damn ships which could use their ventral weapons against the target (because some idiot designer has decided that the increased yield of a ventral plasma cannon was worth _not being able to fire the goddamn main weapon underwater_) were taking horrific casualties as the bloated corpse-white monstrosity seemed to take a pleasure in swallowing them whole. The larger ships were trying to batter at the bulge of water within the shimmering net it bought with it, seeing if it could be disrupted, but whenever a good few hits were landed on it, it would dive back down.

And the damn thing was constantly getting closer to Chicago. They were slowing it down, true. But they weren't killing it, and they weren't stopping it.

And it was coming for them, now.

Martensson shared a glance with Kagamy. She blinked, heavily, red eyes suddenly filled with sorrow, and nodded her head. He swallowed hard, and took a deep breath.

"Charge the ventral cannon up to full. Push it beyond the safety margins; I want everything I can get out of it. Authorisation code: Charley-Hotel-Uniform-Uniform-Tango-Romeo-India-India-Tango. Make it so that we'll get that one shot before burning out everything."

"Sir?" one of the Weapons Officers said, with a worried look on his face.

"We can't stop it from getting us. We've seen what it did to the _Jupiter_. But maybe, if we can fire from inside the force-field thing it has, we can hurt it." He swallowed again. "All non-essential hands, abandon ship."

Sirens began to wail, a newborn cacophony screaming for the incipient death of its ship. Lifepods began to eject from all sides of the ship, even as that horrific, impossible bulge of water bore down on them like a tidal wave.

Commander Martensson turned to his First Officer. "Kagamy. It's been an honour."

She nodded. "Likewise, Matthew."

"If this doesn't work...I'm sorry."

"Charging," the Weapons Officer called out.

"Hold her steady," the Commander replied, staring at the AR projection which gave their location.

"Charging."

"Steady. Fire on my mark!"

The _Blade of Athena_ never got its chance to fire. Faster than the human eye could respond, the Herald suddenly surged forwards, and as the bubble of liquid (not truly describable as "water") encapsulated by the AT-Field surrounded them, the power throughout the ship suddenly ceased, the capacitor banks storing the charge for the ventral cannon discharging unequally, which tore the front of the ship apart in a blossom of internal explosions.

Commander Martensson had the chance to swear once, before the impossibly shard teeth of the entity they called Yam tore the ship in half, crushing the bridge in the guts of the ship as it took the front into its gullet, and reducing the crew within to mangled puppets.

The Herald continued onwards.

~'/|\'~

Within the entry plug of Unit 02, the walls flickered, a cold feeling blowing down the spines of both the Children. It was a familiar sensation, the feeling that occurred when the Third Phase was passed. It felt less than usual for Shinji; a reduced sensation, but what he did feel was odd.

He suddenly shuddered, overcome by a feeling like thousands of spiders crawling over his skin. It diminished as the chill in his spine went, but remained present. That wasn't usual; it was like his skin was in the wrong place, someone pulling it into positions it was not meant to be in.

Asuka made a noise of annoyance, the sound transmuted into a gurgle in the back of the throat by the LCL.

Shinji shivered again. "What now?"

She didn't glance back. "The roof is sealed. How am I meant to be able to stand up?" she asked rhetorically. The girl reached down to the AR panel before her, fingers dancing a brief waltz over the unreal display. "NEG Command, this is Second Lieutenant Soryu, assigned pilot of Evangelion Unit 02. Requesting the unsealing of the Evangelion Hangar."

There was a brief pause, then Misato's face appeared on a projected panel on the front of the entry plug. She was smiling.

"Nice, Asuka!" The Major's face became serious. "I have SubTacCom for you this mission, so I'm in charge. Follow my orders; in an emergency like this, procedure is important. I'm unsealing the roof now."

The Engel hangar, almost gutted to fit the Evangelion, had not been designed to permit something of its magnitude through the doors. Even crawling, Unit 02 would not have been able to get in. It was fortunate that the roofs were retractable. The vaulted roof split down the centre, folding and arcing down into the ground below the hangar, allowing the Evangelion to stand up.

It was a... complicated movement. From its starting position, prostrated in supplication, it almost unfolded upwards, in a way which both reminded onlookers of how a human being, scaled up to an impossible size, would do it, and gave them an impression of inestimable wrongness. Perhaps it was the way the proportions of the arms and legs were off from what they should have been; perhaps it was the way its neck hung forwards, limp and inactive without any motion throughout the whole movement. It was fortunate, perhaps, that everyone in the immediate vicinity was qualified to work on the Engel Project, and thus blasphemous hybrids of mind, machine and extra-dimensional entity were the kind of thing you saw every day.

Finally, the neck straightened, and the Evangelion gazed over the industrial district, outside the arcology proper, with four eyes that glowed a necrotic green. And while Unit 00 had screamed during the incident during start-up, and Unit 01 had roared as it tore its first Heraldic victim to shreds, Unit 02 hissed, a tumultuous escape of gas which left a smell like rotting carrion and fresh blood throughout the area, a vile stench which remained even after the creature had stepped out of the building, loping in a springy run towards the location Major Katsuragi gave them.

The Evangelion slid to a stop right behind one of the thick barrier walls that protected the arcology and surrounding areas, the contaminated waves lapping, thick with noxious, hot hydrocarbons from wherever the Herald had come from.

Shinji groaned and covered his face with his hands. "Urgh..."

Asuka glanced back at him, a look of mild contempt on her face. "What?"

He blinked heavily, the feeling of the thick LCL pushed aside by his eyelids rather unpleasant. "I..." he swallowed, "I'm just feeling a bit dizzy. It doesn't feel... it's sort of odd to have someone else moving your body... well, not my body, but that's what it feels like. And I feel like I've just been spun around."

"Don't be silly. LCL neutralises cochlear balance, leaving you with only visual," pointed out Asuka.

"I'll... I'll be fine. Just ignore me. I'll get used to it."

There was a slightly pitying sigh, the harmonics changed by the fluid. "Try not to throw up inside my Evangelion. I don't know what happens if you do that, and I don't want to find out. Even in the name of science."

The communications window appeared again. "Shinji?" asked Misato. "What are you doing in there?" The Major waved her hand. "Irrelevant. Asuka, are you able to operate at peak operational capacity with him present? If you can't I'll pull you back."

The red haired girl smiled politely. "I believe I am able to function at full capacity, yes."

The Major nodded. "Good. Major Katsuragi out."

Asuka turned to Shinji, smile gone. "Screw this up for me, Third Child, and I _will_ personally make you regret it."

Shinji shuffled, insofar as he could, further towards the back of the entry plug.

Back in the control room, Misato could see several high ranking officers frowning at her. However, it was a civilian who spoke up.

"That is not wise," stated Tokita, the chief engineer for Project Daeva.

"The _Fist of Perseus_ is going down!" called out someone, from the other side of the room, igniting a babble of voices.  
"We're down to three cruisers!"  
"That bastard is just picking off all our heavy ships at its leisure, zigzagging back and forth, but it keeps on getting closer!"  
"What does it take to kill this thing!"

Misato glared at him. "Is there a reason that civilian is here, in C2 Command?" she asked acidly.

"Yes, actually," he replied, his tone matching hers in pH. "Project Daeva is managing the deployment of our Araska. We don't deny that it's still in the prototype stage, and so needs close watching. However," and at this, his voice actually became more polite, albeit the politeness that freezes oceans and burns to the touch, "perhaps we won't spend fourteen years in the prototype stage. And as for why it's not wise, you are risking two-thirds of your pilot complement here. A loss here would cripple the only thing we have right now which is certain to kill a Herald. We can't pick up your slack yet."

Misato turned her back on him, jawline locked rigid. Without Ritsuko here, to make her act as the sane one, she was succumbing to the same craziness, it seemed.

"Tokita, we've got the umbilical cable connected," called out one of his subordinates, from behind Misato's back. "Efficiency is at 90%; we lost one set of superconductors in sub-section 3, but the crew have rerouted around it and the DCS is effecting repairs. We can boost the laser with power from the C2 grid."

"Good, good," he replied. "Polana," turning his head to another one, "how does the ventral laser read?"

"It's green across the board. The coolant systems are in place and locked; power has been diverted from the cee-bees to them."

"Sustained fire is go?"

"Yes, sir. We can maintain it for 310 seconds, plus or minus 40 seconds, before we have to do a 20 second coolant flush slash refill."

"Damn. That's suboptimal." He waved a hand. "Someone, make a note that we'll need to check the heat management systems. That's less than 80% of what it should be. Nevertheless, can we greenlight firing?"

Polana paused for a moment, then nodded her head. "Yes."

"Then do it."

~'/|\'~

From the vantage point of the Evangelion, both Asuka and Shinji could see the beam that cut out from along the shoreline, on their right. It wasn't visible from what it was, but from what it did to the atmosphere, the green-blue of a naval laser scattered into the atmosphere. It was very familiar to Shinji; two weeks ago he had fired one which made that one, potent though it was, look like one mounted on the lightest of powered armours. They may have been plugged into the Chicago power network, but the Araska had not been modified in the same way as the _Academia_, and it would have fried had it tried to use all the power which an arcology could generate.

What it lacked in yield, however, it compensated for with duration. The laser lanced out to kiss the bulge of water which moved around, a vast mound of water akin to a hill, which shimmered with dark threads and the iridescences of a layer of oil. The familiar shattering of the AT-Field could be seen; the blue-green scattering of the laser stopped dead by the sidereal shifting shapes which layered around the impact point. And it kept steady; the beam focussed on the white shape in the water, no matter how it moved.

And the water sang, the call of the Herald echoing and amplified by the entire lake, filled with emotion, which struck all that heard it. It would have been understandable had it been a bestial roar, some hellish yell from a leviathan that had last been on Earth before the Oxygen Catastrophe. That could be conceptualised, categorised, limited. No, the song of Yam and its annoyance was one of inestimable beauty; the harmonics perfect, the melody extending far beyond the human range of hearing. And its magnitude was such that audio detection systems in NEG vessels and units burned out, tearing apart a frigate too close to the Herald, as it changed its pitch to the resonant frequency of the vessel's hull, shattering it apart.

_**self|ego|entity sense|behold|perceive potential|possible|inferior target|victim|threat!  
self|ego|entity future|be|certain consumption|nourishment|devour. **_

The Herald turned, the water around it boiling off as the AT-Field shifted the phase possibilities so that the coherent electromagnetic radiation had always been absorbed by the water, and headed straight towards the shore.

Under Asuka's control, Unit 02 twisted, sprinting to the point of closest _It had been another row._ approach, the feet leaving massive dents in even the reinforced surface on which the shipyards were built, the reinforced permacrete crumpling under the incredible pressure of a forty metre biped. The square-cube law was the bane of mecha designers, akin to how thermodynamics had been prior to the invention of the D-Engine. Nevertheless, the floor held, even when one leap proved necessary to bypass a _The others had condemned it as immature and unprofessional, but, frankly, she hadn't cared._ bunker than blocked the way, its armoured bulk too slow to go around.

A few drops of blood seeped out of Shinji's nose, vanishing in the already vital liquid that surrounded them.

And then things started going really _She was right;_ wrong.

Back in the command centre, the SubTacCom from which the Araska was operating began screaming red, alarms crying out with an urgency normally only saved for catastrophic D-Engine problems, a so-called "Horizon Event". The scientists and engineers monitoring the prototype began to babble almost simultaneously.

"Weapon emergency shutdown. Trying to reboot."  
"Fluctuations in the mD/D Hybrid Engine. Connections are being cut at random and reforming!"  
"Allergic reaction! Allergic reaction! DCS slash SEN nanites are being rejected by the Type-S"

"Rampancy! We have... rampancy!"

Wrapping his arms around himself, Tokita glanced from screen to screen, his eyes never stationary for more than a few seconds at a time. "_Renar op camapy!_," he swore. "What's going on?! What's causing this!"

"The Type-S is going rampant. It spontaneously rejected all the stabilising nanites infused through its flesh. Look!"

Indeed, the Navy project seemed to be bulging and warping, its surface twisting as the artificial shell that covered it was torn apart from within by the black, tar-like material within, its shape morphing and twisting, forming organs and organelles at random. A phosphorescent constellation of eyes gazed from the night sky of the Type-S, gazing up at the sky for the first time.

Tokita swallowed hard, running his hands up and down his forearms in a repetitive, unconscious motion. "Get them out of there!" he ordered. "Tell the crew to eject, before it breaches their capsules!"

There was a flurry of discussion between the handlers and the crew of the Araska.

"Pods G1 to G4 are away," Polana said, blinking heavily. "Crew reports that the Type-S has blocked the tubes for the central command pods. Escape pods will not fire."

"Damn," Tokita said, face suddenly haggard, as if he had suddenly aged twenty years. "They were good men." He turned to face Xu, taking a deep breath. " Vice Admiral, I regret to inform you that," he swallowed again, "there has been a catastrophic breakdown in the Type-S armour, which has renatured and returned to its original instincts." He paused and then continued. "The Araska Prototype is to be considered hostile from this moment on."

~'/|\'~

"Hey," said Asuka, frowning. "The laser's stopped."

Shinji winced. "Maybe it overheated, and's running a cooling cycle," he suggested.

"Maybe," _and that was all there was to it._ the red-headed girl replied, obvious doubt in her voice.

The visual display popped back into existence. It was the Major. "The idiots at Daeva have lost control of the Araska," she said, obviously biting back an invective. "Consider it hostile. Kill the Herald, then clean up as best you can."

Asuka swore. "I knew it was suspicious. _She was right; the other woman was wrong, and that was all there was to it._ We're going after the Herald personally!"

Shinji groaned. It really didn't seem like a good idea, and he was feeling really, really bad.

"Just watch me, Third Child!"

And with that said, Asuka bent and leapt, wrapping her AT-Field tight around herself and

_This time, the idiot had been supporting the older design for incorporation into the new model. Honestly, what was she? Stupid? The upgrade to cranial firepower far outweighed the downside of the increased power consumption and reduced rate of fire._

"Look," she had said, "you're not looking at the plans for what the final model will look like. You're too limited by the incomplete Test Model and the Prototype. Just look at what the final model will look like; after all, the older ones are obviously going to be refitted."

thrust up into the air, a perfect, impossible arc that ended up with her on top of a cargo ship holding position over the coastline, out of the water to protect itself. The ship lurched hideously as the momentum of the Evangelion slammed into it, but miraculously the hull held, even as it buckled.

Blood began to flow freely from both of the boy's nostrils, the hot blood unnoticeable in the LCL, heated to body temperature. Shinji began to feel dizzy, though, and grabbed the side of the tube as best he could.

Unit 02 crouched on top of the ship, like a predatory animal, green eyes staring intently at the oncoming rush of the Herald. Asuka clenched her hands around the control sticks, and the DF Blades on the hands and feet of activated, "_No," the other woman had replied._ the arcane ward blending with the superior AT-field to allow it slice through the skin of a Herald with ease.

"I wish we had more guns," said Shinji, weakly.

"The DF-Blades should be enough," she replied, confidently. "And I have a little surprise for the Herald, too." And then she pounced, casting off from the dented vessel in a way that damaged it more, up into the air only to come down like the fist of an ancient god, claws aimed right for the Herald's head.

It was a good leap. All four limbs, sharpened for cutting and tearing and slicing to the limits of mundane technology and enhanced further by sorcery and the physics-raping AT-Field slammed into the Herald's field. But one was wrapped tightly around the biped, while the other was larger, holding a hill of water safe from the volatile, toxic gas that filled the atmosphere of this world, and so the Herald's protection was popped like a ripe carbuncle, jets of oily water spraying out at high pressure from the hole that the neutralising

"_You're sacrificing control for something which does not optimise the mission profile. Need I remind you what would happen if control is not maintained?"_

_"Oh, I know it," she had said, smiling sweetly. "Control must be maintained at all times."_

effects of Unit 02 had punched in the Field.

The Evangelion was embedded in the head of the leviathan, the forty metre walker dwarfed by the beast. The claws tore into the thick white skin, letting a creamy-white ichor seep from the wounds into the surrounding waters.

"You really like jumping off things so that you can kill other things," said Shinji softly, breathing deep gulps of LCL. "Are you looking for a fast-track promotion to Major, or something?"

He only received a quick glance back. "Shut up, idiot. Watch this."

And with that said, Asuka worked the Evangelion's left arm out of the thick skin, making sure to open the wound further with the exit, then, folding her fingers into a fist, punched the Herald as hard as possible in the back of what she thought corresponded to its head, triggering the PP1-P Plasmathrower, to send a rush of energetic particles deep into its body. Hopefully, it would burn out the inside of the monster, just as it had melted the first Swarm Ship she had killed.

In theory.

In practice, it went considerably worse. The sensors detected that the PP1-P was immersed in what it read to be water, and so switched to aquatic mode, taking the raw materials it would ionise from the fluid that surrounded it, turning on the suction pumps which would take in the liquid. What had not been expected was that the thick, viscous oils of wherever the Herald had come from, combined with the vile ichors which made up its blood, would jam the intake, causing it to detect a blockage and switch to internal supplies. Of course, once the pressure ceased, the fluids began to move normally, causing it to register that the error had been fixed, and switch back to external mode. This would not have been a fatal problem, except the extent to which the PP1-P had been miniaturised from its intended version, a ship-mounted weapon intended to flush out Deep One cities, meant that the tolerances had been dramatically reduced. The pumps began to heat up drastically. In addition, a build up of gas from the internal reservoir, atomised but not yet expelled, meant that, even with the magnetic containment, the weapon began to heat up.

"_Then why do you insist on these changes?" had been the response she had got._

"Because it's obvious the MP design is superior!," she had replied, angrily. "What are you, stupid?"

It only took one of the superconductors to fail for the ionised gas to spill out into the main weapon, fusing the components and causing the internal D-Engine to shut down to prevent a Horizon Event. An explosion blossomed out from the left arm of the Evangelion.

And then the hydrocarbon-saturated water, oxygenated by the hole that Unit 02 had punched though the AT-Field which had kept that loathsome, reactive gas away from the Herald, caught fire. With a whoosh which surrounded and embraced Yam, the protective layer of the waters of its homeworld combusted, thick black clouds soaring forth.

_**Traitor|traitor|traitor! Traitor|traitor|traitor! Traitor|traitor|traitor!  
Toxic|reactive|16 burns|corrodes|hurts hurts|burns|hurts!  
Scars|wounds|pain back|head|centre pain|agony|hurts kill|kill|kill traitor|heretic|usurper!**_

It did not sing this time. It did not make a noise. It turned to get away from the agony, from the heat from inside the Guard of Yog Sothoth for the first time in hundreds of millions of years of existence, from the scars dug deep into it by the heretic that hung on its back, from the noxious, horrific gas which the monsters which lived in this planet used for respiration. It hurt so much. It seemed like it would always end up hurting.

"Gottverdammt! Scheiße, scheiße, scheiße! Sie haben behauptet, sie hätten ihn repariert, aber der Plasmawerfer ist schon wieder kaputt. Hören Sie mich,Sie Schwachköpfe?" yelled Asuka, mind overcome with rage, as she tried to contain the damage through the phantom pain in her own arm. "Sie haben die Reparaturen versaut und jetzt ist er hochgegangen. Wenn ich hier rauskomme, werde ich euch alle zur Strecke bringen, euch zu Muß quetschen, auf euren Leichen herumspringen und dann euch selbst zum Fraß vorwerfen!" she continued as the synchronisation ratio dropped and the attempts for Unit 02 to hold onto the back of the Herald became more spasmodic and jerky.

Yes, Unit 02 had its own problems. Prime among these was the fact that it was in the middle of a burning cocktail of oil and whatever the white leviathan used for its blood. Indeed, the cream ichor which flowed forth burned in the water, reacting even with the oxygen dissolved in the water. The temperature gauge was rising alarmingly. The left arm was damaged; the torn muscles on the left arm were exposed, bright red blood flowing forth, though it remained usable. Moreover, they were being dragged

Shinji sat at the back of the entry plug and "_No," the other woman had replied._ clutched his skull. His head was a solid lump of agony, the worst migraine he had ever experienced thumping behind both eye sockets, like something was trying to push out his eyeballs. Even his eyes were blurring; he was seeing red lines before them. Everything hurt so much, in a way that felt like it would never stop. His right wrist locked up, twisted into a claw that tore at his cheek, and Unit 02 mimicked the movement, tearing out of the hide of the Herald in a way that only released more of that reactive blood.

Before his red tinted vision, the communications window opened up.

"Asuka! Shinji!" shouted Misato. "What's going on?!" She blinked, eyes worried. "Report," snapped the Major.

Asuka forced all thoughts of revenge and rage against the designer of the PP1-P out of her head. "Beruhig dich, Asuka, ruhig Blut. Konzentriere dich. Cool bleiben," she muttered to herself. She took a deep breath of LCL. It tasted of blood... more so than usual. "The Plasmathrower malfunctioned and blew up... and we seem to be on fire," she reported.

"I know that," said the Major, with forced calm. "You've almost lost the AT-Field. Get a grip of yourself, and get it back up. Try to keep with it and do as much damage as you can."

Asuka focussed. Her mind was still. She was herself, and no-one else. She was the pilot of Unit 02. The AT-Field came back at full strength, spiking up as both the shield and the sword of the Evangelion.

Shinji screamed.

"_I'm not the stupid one here. I don't have certain," and there was a pause, "proclivities __**MINE**__ which resulted in something which had to be covered up at notable cost. Not to mention the long term consequences." The brunette __**ENEMY**__ had smiled, triumphantly.  
__  
She hated her so much. The idiot __**ENEMY**__ didn't understand at all, and she kept on bringing it up. __Everyone else was inferior; she had ensured that the negative recessives would not show, while maintaining the best common features __**CARE**__. It was necessary._

There was a hum, as the door slid open. The man _**WEAK**__ who entered had flinched, slightly, as he saw the two women staring at each other._

He had sucked in the air between his teeth. "I'm sorry," he _**WEAK**__ had said, "but you're needed in the main lab. I think we have progress with the neural links, with my refined design for the nerve clips.__**CARE**__"_

And together they had left, the man in the middle as a barrier between the two.

_**BODY MINE  
ENEMY MINE  
SELF MINE**__  
_

Shinji spasmed, autonomous, uncontrolled movements replacing any thought, blood rushing forth from his eyes, ears, mouth and nose alike. His unconscious body detached from the seat, and floated, limp, in the LCL, gravity meaningless in the neutrally buoyant fluid.

The AT-Field back active, Asuka resumed her task of dismantling the Herald, even as it tried to flee. The PP1-P may have broken, but she still had her charge beams, and she still had her claws. Digging the Evangelion's feet, and its spur, into the leviathan's back, she straightened up, relativistic particle beams lancing down from the head mounts into the wounds on the back of the beast, even as she clawed down into it, slashing down with precision, over and over again.

"Die," she muttered to herself. "Die, die,die!"

Yam twisted furiously, trying to detach the murderous being, the traitor and usurper, attached to its back. It even dared the noxious atmosphere, leaping clean out of the water, twisting through the poison that burned it, but Asuka rode the burning white behemoth, feet fastened into its body through the aerial roll. In fact, all that produced was a clean shot for the NEG ships, and they took it, nascent suns vomited forth from the surviving ships with ventral plasma weapons, which impacted against the 'wings' of the somewhat ray-like beast, burning holes which merely sped up the oxygenated fires that licked up against it.

Back in Command, a notable percentage of the higher ranked members of the NEG military watched the auto-censored image feed. Auto-censors were a particularly useful tool for individuals not stationed on the front lines, watching image feeds. The fairly smart LAIs which made up the programmes were designed to reduce the image to a form which could be dismissed as unreal by the ape-brain, thus evading some of the more blatant triggers of Aeon War Syndrome. The most common way was to render the image as if it were an animated cartoon from at least a century ago, before the advent of photorealistic computer graphics. Sadly, the loss in clarity and the image lag for each frame to be rendered made it impractical for front-line use, and there was still AWS symptoms from the higher brain functions, which realised that the images were real, even if they appeared false. To use the long-discredited psychology of Sigmund Freud, as a 'lie-to-children' to help explain the phenomenon, the auto-censor prevented AWS induced by the Id (which was responsible for the "Viewing" AWS), but left the others open to "Knowing" AWS. But it was a help.

Of course, even the conscious mind has problems accepting that you are watching a forty metre robot surf a giant white monster which is on fire, and which just leapt out of the water and did a barrel roll.

"I'd like to say that shocked me," declared Misato, "but frankly I'm getting a bit jaded about what the Evangelions do." She looked around. "It's just as well that Ritsuko hasn't shown up from that meeting with Dr Miyakame; she'd be going crazy over this," she added, _sotto voce_. "Possibly literally." The Major began to gnaw at a finger nail, noticing that she seemed to have ended up in a position in this room quite outside her actual military rank from the fact that the Evangelion seemed to be able to hurt the target. "Do we have any more assets at all?" she asked the room.

"All naval assets are engaged."  
"Air assets have withdrawn; they're not doing anything. We have four wings of heavy bombers headed down from the NA Frontline, from the Migou pullback, but they're not going to be here for thirty minutes."  
"This isn't a conventional mecha fight. They're all deployed by the waterfront; we don't have enough amphibious units stationed in C2 to make a difference."  
"The Engels are there too. The Herald is out of their weight class. Even a Seraph or a Chashmal couldn't get through the AT-Field, even if the presence of your Evangelion within it is weakening it. This is a fight for ships."

A light went on in Misato's eyes. "That ship... the cargo vessel that Asu... Unit 02 jumped onto," she said, barely breathing. "Can we use that? I know it's unarmed, but..." She turned to Tokita, the Chief Engineer for the rapidly discredited Project Daeva. "We're going to need everything you can tell us about the Type-S."

~'/|\'~

Asuka paused for a moment. She seemed to only doing superficial damage; without the PP1-P, she couldn't flood the lacerations she opened in the creature with ionised gas. She needed to do more damage. Unit 02 bent down, AT-Field wrapped tight around itself, protected from the intense heat from the chemical reactions in the water, and stuck both claws into an open wound, bladed fingers thrust aside, as she pulled the wound open even further, causing a fresh rush of heat, and the white leviathan to twist and turn under water as a fresh wave of agony filled its mind.

The pain only increased when the crimson titan, dwarfed by the beast it rode, began firing charge beam after charge beam into the wound, the relativistic particles in the beam tearing worm-like tunnels into the softer inner flesh.

The Herald then knew that it had to get out of here. Its oaths to the First were not worth this pain, this agony. It would retreat and sleep beneath the waves of a planet not like this one, one with a proper atmosphere and proper, truly sapient life. And it would not even be able to return and destroy this pitiful ball of iron and silicates, for this was the traitor and usurper's planet, and such action would result in its death. If only it could get rid of the _thing_ on its back...

It was at this moment that Asuka felt a hand brush against her breast, as she fought to retain the hold of the Herald, as it tried to spin to get her off.

"Pervert!" she yelled, pulling a hand away from the controls to slap the boy in the face. "Do something useful, damn it!"

The blow, softened by its passage from the LCL, collided with Shinji's right cheek. The body, knocked by the impact, floated gently towards the back of the plug. His unseeing eyes, pupils dilated and rolled back in their sockets, gazed at nothingness.

Asuka drew in a deep gulp of liquid. "Misato," she called, "there's a problem with the Third Child. He's unconscious or something."

There was a pause. "His vitals are stable, but weak," the older woman reported, an odd note in her voice. "What the hell happened?"

"I don't know," she yelled back, as the Herald bucked from side to side, trying to build up a resonant frequency which would throw her off. "He... argh... he wasn't sounding well a bit... maybe some reaction to fact 02's calibrated differently."

A pinch of guilt ran through Asuka's mind. _This is my fault. I shouldn't have taken him in here. After all, he isn't prepared for a MP Evangelion; Unit 01 is probably different enough that there are problems with synchronisation._

_No!_ she thought immediately. _Unit 02 is mine, and I care for it. He's weak if he can't synchronise properly and faints at a time like this. It shows that you can't rely on anyone but yourselves."_

But still, he did look rather pathetic floating there, in the plug suit that didn't fit properly and the darker cloud of LCL around him._ It was just as well, _she thought_, that from what I've been told, LCL can be used as a substitute for human blood. From the change in the colour of the fluid, he's lost a lot._

No. Focus. It can wait until after we've killed this thing.

"Right," ordered the Major, "keep it in as much pain as possible. Hurt it. And be prepared to get away from the Herald when necessary."

"Okay." The clawing and mutilation of the ancient being resumed.

Back in the control room, Misato took a deep breath. "Damn. Damn. Damn. Poor Shinji." The Major shook her head. "Doesn't matter; he's still alive. I want a full medical team to be prepared for when we recover the Evangelion. How is the clean-up of the lakeside going?"

"We have the rest of the rampant Type-S contained. The Engels have it trapped within a perimeter, and they're systematically cleansing it."

"Good."

Most of the room was watching the AR map projected onto the central table, as a blue icon, marked "High Priority", pursued the Herald icon. The fires were spreading across the lake surface, the inferno of the Herald igniting the oily scum which had followed it through the hole in space, forming thick black clouds.

"One question, Major." It was the Vice Admiral.

"Yes?"

"How did you come up with an idea like that? It's almost the epitome of 'so stupid it might just work'?"

"When it was coming in, I noticed that it would devour anything that got in its way. It was the death of the _Blade of Athena_ that really gave me the idea. I was going to suggest that we feed it Unit 02, and have it cut its way out from inside," she glanced at her audience, who were staring at her. "Don't worry. We've done something similar before." They didn't stop staring. "But then there was something else to feed it. Let's see if it gives the bastard stomach ache."

~'/|\'~

A cargo ship, with a notable dent in its side, flew over the top of the Herald, its A-Pods burning a bright blue. A fight of Auphans, the fastest of the Engels, flocked around it, firing their Plasma cannons at the surface of its hull. The miniature suns that they birthed slammed into the black, tar-like secretions which covered the ship, emerging from within the breached cargo hull through burst open hatches. More Engels stood on the surface, hand-held flamethrowers cutting a white-hot swath through the extra-dimensional entity, casting their balls of fire at the darkness.

Suddenly, they all peeled off, their own A-Pods glowing as they jumped from the carrier ship, letting the blackness well up, thick and oozing, the implicit viscera forming eyes to gaze from this new place.

The escape pod fired, expelling the last humans from the ship. The crew within the hull of the crippled Araska, as much of the ship and its Type-S armour scraped and contained within the damaged cargo ship, had been long since digested by the entity which had been intended to protect them. The ship took a tight dive downwards, into the water.

Right into the path of the Herald.

It swallowed the vessel reflexively. Why should it not? It would need nutrients to help rebuild the horrific damage which had been inflicted on it.

There was a moment, as the oozing blackness hit the back of its gullet, when it realised what the abominations which lived on this monstrous planet had done.

Just a moment, before the night-like tar-beast burst outwards, the programmed imperatives of the long-dead Elder Things still present for this particular foe.

Yam came to a stop almost immediately, as the Type-S, resplendent with its sidereal eyes, spread through the white body like a cancer, digesting and tearing apart the ancient entity from within. It now knew true pain. The agony, from the noxious gas and the burning and the high-energy particle beams; it was nothing to being digested from inside out. It could not even use the gift of Yog Sothoth, because the presence of the traitor on its back weakened it enough that the faculties which the entity had been engineered for, the ability to negative the shifting phase spaces, could allow it free reign.

The Herald did the only thing it could do in those circumstances. Shifting its somewhat protean biology (though it was nothing compared to the black cancer, which was sprouting teeth coated in enzymes designed to tear apart its flesh in the most painful way possible), it pushed the core of its soul, the glowing red orb, upwards through its body, away from the Type-S and towards the usurper that clung to its back.

_**Preferable|desirable|better die|cease|stop by|caused|induced specified|selected|chosen method|way|cease**_,

it thought, mind overcome with pain.

Asuka saw a glint of red, in the wounds she was opening, having resorted to using the Unit's teeth as well as the claws to sped up the destruction, swallowing the meat without chewing. Flexing the muscles of the Evangelion, even the damaged left arm, she tore a vast swath of hide off, pulling milky white flesh (now shot through with tiny black tubules) away. A red sphere, remarkably similar in colour to Unit 02 lay there.

_And now to finish off,_ she thought, as she wrapped both hands about the globe and pulled it out, all the time pounding charge beam after charge beam into its surface, cutting out small chips as its surface rang like some unearthly bell. Prying it free, with a fresh current of reactive creamy blood, she lifted it up in both hands, noticing the black protrusions which grew from it, their vital vicissitudes quite unlike the geometrical perfection of the sphere. Pulling back, she slammed the forehead of the Evangelion into it.

At least, that was what she intended to do.

She wasn't quite sure what had actually happened; her jaws suddenly ached, like they had been very quickly dislocated and relocated. Moreover, her body felt wrong, as if she were subtly the wrong shape. Nevertheless, the orb had gone dim, turning grey before her eyes, flaking apart and shattering, as if something vital had been taken from it.

Then it exploded.

The explosion cast the Evangelion out of the water, hurling it through the air. It landed again, head first,in a slick of burning oils, and vanished below the surface.

It came up again, floating face down, unmoving.

~'/|\'~

Dr Akagi and Major Katsuragi sat by the window, staring out over the lake far below. Before them, vehicles scuttled over the surface of the water, trying to contain the situation. The consequences of the release of what the Araska had been using in the Type-S armour lay before them; while the entire surface of Lake Michigan was on fire, the thick black smoke roiling and burning as the polluted waters burned, a core of differently coloured flames indicating the presence of the transition metals in the water. It was like some scene out of a medieval book of the end of the world. There was a burning lake of fire beside the city, that many primitivist superstitionist groups comprised of those that dwelt outside the arcologies, called Babylon, ruled over by the Anti-Christ, leader of the New Earth Government.

Most of those groups were under investigation for Code-El cults.

Misato shuddered. The Evangelion had just devoured the black tar-like things and the Herald alike. And this wasn't the first time. That first time, Unit 01 had latched those tentacles it had vomited forth onto the red orb on the front of Asherah, and had consumed its way through the Kathirat.

_They're volatile monsters,_ she thought. _If we didn't have control of them, they'd be worse than those_ things _from the Fall of New Kuala Lumpur. Poor Quien and the others..._

She shook her head, sadly, slumped back in her soft seat.

Ritsuko glanced at her. "You did it again."

"I was stupid. This was a strategic disaster. The lake is ecologically dead, and we've released whatever the Type-S was into the wild. I saw how fast it split and grew. And on top of that, wherever the Herald came from, it was rich in oil; the entire lake is burning."

"You know, a hundred years ago, we'd have been preparing to invade." She caught Misato's glare. "Yes, I know. Inappropriate. But you were thinking it too. Even you know that before the invention of the D-Engine, everybody invaded everyone else to get oil."

"The whole thing was a farce," she continued, ignoring the doctor. "The plasmathrower malfunctioned, the C2 fleet took massive casualties, the Araska prototype went rampant. And we should have been prepared for an attack from a Herald."

The blond woman cocked her head, adjusting the AR sunglasses she was wearing. "Why? They haven't attacked anywhere else before."

"Yes, but of course," she layered on the sarcasm, "of course the first time we take time away from L2, we're attacked here. How the hell did it come here? What was it looking for?"

Ritsuko looked her steadily in the eye. "We have no idea. All we have is hypotheses and wild ideas."

"What draws all the Heralds?" continued Misato, ignoring her. "Is it the Evangelions? Are there cultists that summon them to try to sabotage the war effort? What does it all mean!"

The scientist poured out a second pair of drinks. Neither of them were alcoholic; they had far, far too much paper-work (and in the case of Misato, explanations to superiors) to be inebriated, and so ethanol was switched for caffeine.

Misato sighed. "Thanks, Rits. I'm not going to be sleeping tonight after all this... not that I'd want to, from what I've seen, even from the auto-censored TacCom data," she added darkly.

"It's fine. I'm sorry I wasn't there for everything; Dr Miyakame were in the safe null-bunker for the entire length of the incident." She coughed. "And it's not the Evangelions," she added, "since, after all, Unit 02's been active in Germany longer than either of the other two, and hasn't attracted any Heralds."

"Forgot about that. Yeah."

There was silence, as the two women looked out over the water.

Then, suddenly, Misato balled up a fist and punched it into her other hand. "Damn it! I'm really pissed off!"

Ritsuko leant back, a puzzled expression on her face. "Where did that come from?" she asked.

"I saw both the teenagers off to studied confinement. Shinji was on a stretcher; he was bleeding from everywhere on his head; eyes, nose, mouth, ears, everywhere. What the hell went on in that thing?! And what the hell did Asuka think she was doing by taking him in it!"

"Calm down," said Ritsuko, quietly, taking a look around. "You're drawing attention. And, in all honesty, we had no clue that would happen. Seriously. In retrospect, it's kind of obvious that you can't just put someone in a improperly configured war machine, but no-one really thought about it in design. We've got plenty of things that mean that only the proper user could start it up, but we never thought that the pilot would take another person into the entry plug, especially not one who was already trained to operate them and thus sensitised."

Misato made a noise of disgust. "But Asuka is meant to be a genius; she has a better degree than me, for goodness sake. And she's half my age.

"And none of us noticed it, either." There was a bitter laugh. "Really bright people can break foolproof systems in ways that fools can only dream."

"And the bastards in the Daeva team!" continued Misato. She really felt like breaking something right now, but she restrained herself. "Snide jerks who went wrong a lot more catastrophically than we ever have. Why the hell did the Araska go rampant like that, at the worst possible moment! And what the hell were they using in that thing?"

"I have no idea what happened," stated Ritsuko, her face perfectly blank. Oh, some people might have suspicions about why the event happened just as the Evangelion moved towards it, but they would only ever remain suspicions. The Daeva team certainly wouldn't have known that the biological programming encoded by the Elder Things would lead the 'Type-S' to attack what it perceived to be two of its old enemies, and she certainly wasn't about to tell them. "But for what they were using; well, I have my suspicions, and, frankly, it's a sign that you can go too far with ACXB research."

She didn't know whether to laugh or cry after saying that. She repressed both urges.

Misato sighed. "Yeah, I guess you're right." She snapped her fingers, pulling out her dark green PCPU (the secure one), logging on, and tossed it over to Ritsuko. "There's some pretty important data in there; the entire contents of Unit 02's black box. Copy and back it up, then give me back my PCPU."

The doctor started the data transfer, and began to flick through it while she waited.

Misato made an inquisitive noise.

"This is important," Ritsuko said softly, even breathing with care. "Very important indeed."

"Did they break any synch-ratio records?" asked the black haired woman, taking a sip of her drink.

"Asuka did, but that's just a normal procedure. There's a seven second period where her ratio spikes up to 99%, probably because of the danger. But look at Shinji's data," she added, eyes narrowed. "Most of the time he's tracking as normal, a good 20 to 30 points below Asuka; probably due to the lack of A10 clips and the fact that some of the things in Asuka's LCL cocktail would be bad for the concentration of anyone with a Y chromosome..."

"Wha...?" asked Misato, sitting up.

"LCL has a cocktail of various drugs designed to maintain mental stability in solution," explained Ritsuko, in a distracted tone of voice. "The male and female brains work differently. LCL-f, for example, has, well, a very large number of compounds, but examples include pherohydamulate, assorted hormone modulators, tetrapentaline benzoate, hexadasophospate rezol-3-4,4-ulate..." She paused. "You're not understanding any of this, are you?" At Misato's negative noise, she continued, "Well, all of the standard compounds given to soldiers, then a number only issued to special forces, the GIA, and certain branches of the OIS. You know, as a commissioned officer in a high AWS-risk assignment, you're on some of them, too, you just don't know their names." She shook her head. "But we're getting distracted. Look at these regions, before he drops to zero from the loss of consciousness."

A number of graphs displayed on screen were pushed towards Misato, who indicated that, yes, they were visible to her.

"Look at those points. If I run a mod function over them, they appear to be fine, and even increased over those regions, but they drop down to almost zero on the graph." She shuddered. "That's impossible. It shouldn't be doing things like that. You ... it's impossible."

"That word," began Misato, "I don't think it means..."

Ritsuko smiled excessively sweetly. "Not another word from you, thank you very much. Yes," she declared, thumping her hand down on the table, making the drinks rattle, "this is important. And impossible, yes. We have yet another anomaly with synchronisation ratios. As if that incident with Rei and Unit 00 wasn't _already_ bad enough. And it's completely different from that."

She tapped her fingers on the table.

"This may need some further study..."

~'/|\'~

"Hmm."

"And what is that supposed to mean?", the female Nazzadi with the insignia of a NEGN Colonel asked, with a pronounced hint of irritation in her voice.

"Nothing," the blond woman replied, still staring at the computer screen. "Well, that's not strictly true."

The black-skinned woman sighed. She hated her assignment with the Special Weapons Division at times like this, she really did. The projects and developments were often brilliant, revolutionary, and had potential for paradigm shifts in warfare. This one was a particularly good example; it could massively reduce the number of recruits that the NEGA needed, by an ingenuous Command-and-Control system that would, through extensive automation and specially trained commanders, replace many of the basic infantry and power armoured troopers. But the scientists who came up with these things... well, a colleague had described them as a bunch of opera divas prancing along a catastrophe curve, and frankly, right now she was inclined to agree with him.

They always seemed to prevaricate, and took a perverse pleasure in being obtuse in ways that meant that you looked ignorant for asking them. And bloody stupid word games in coming up with names for their projects, who could forget that? It was a plague infecting the scientific community, and even the damn engineers!

Nevertheless, she bit. "Please, explain."

"The EMSS scores for these two candidates are point three zero four over what they should be. Both of them. To as precisely as we can measure it."

"So?"

"It's a common trait for that entire test group. But only that one. B2, P2, C2, T3; all of those ones have been within half a standard deviation of the expected results. But all of this group are consistently higher than they should be."

The Nazzadi Colonel stared into the other woman's eyes. "Is that a concern? What's causing it?"

The blond woman sucked in air through her teeth. "For the first question; no. There does seem to be a corresponding increase in LAAM score; three point nine one on average, but that's still safely below the safety threshold. We've screened out all the high LAAM candidates; an 83, for example, would be horribly risky. The retroviral modifications would leave them very prone to synchronisation; they'd probably lose control of the part of their brain that would permit them to distinguish between reality and psychically induced hallucinations."

"And yet I've heard it mentioned that you've tolerated the existence of single candidate with an LAAM of 100?" the Nazzadi asked, acidly.

"It is true that the Second Infant has that score. He is a one-off; the test bed, so to speak, for the technologies. At no point has he suffered a synchronisity incident, however. It was a necessary part of producing the gene templates and mapping the different nature of these parapsychic powers.

"Why then do you permit the continued existence of the subject then?" she continued, in the same tone of voice.

"He is a stable Perseus commander; you have access to his VREES records. I can assure you that we have no other subjects with an LAAM of over 50 involved in Project Perseus, and the mode is 21.41."

"And the other part of my question?"

"No, there is no theory that could explain this."

The blond woman hoped that her choice of words would go unnoticed. The ignorance so prevalent in society about the difference between a _hypothesis_ and a _theory_ could even be useful sometimes, annoying though it was.

"It may be an diet factor outside our control, or even something to do with arcology air quality," she continued. "All newer Batch-Types are being raised in proper control groups, but these ones are in a normal environment, and so we can't account for all the variables," she added. "The Batch-Types are promising, but the eldest candidate in that group was only born six years ago, and none of them have the mental fortitude nor the established personalities to be able to synchronise with the adult, albeit blank minds of the Type-Numerals, without, as we have found, catastrophic damage to their immature minds.

The black-skinned woman nodded. "But what we at the SWD are really interested in is whether you will be able deploy sufficient Paragon candidates as Perseus commanders for Operation CATO."

The blond woman nodded. "That is already under way. Arrangements have been made for all the batches that we're deploying, and the cover stories are in place. C2, L2 and T3 are to be put in command of the new Type VII models. Each candidate should be able to command a force about the size of two companies; this is their first major operation, and they are not properly trained. We can only justify yearly immersion sessions, beyond their normal check-ups."

"Despite the given consent?"

"Yes; it was only limited, and there are the cross-contamination effects from the other Project. Both of us need the retroviral alterations to make them suitable candidates, although we're looking for different functions in the expressed qualities. It's fortunate that the Second and the Third are what they are, which allows us to share resources."

She cleared her throat.

"Anyway, they're only serving as motive force and command, through; we wouldn't actually make them marionette the Type VII. Only the Second has displayed such abilities and survived; we lost several candidates in the old training regime. In addition, the candidate groups for B2 and P2 were viewed as too weak for the Type VII, but they will be deployed in command of the obsolete Type VI, in company sized formations. Moreover, the Second Infant, the Prototype, will be deployed with VREES, commanding a brigade level formation, as usual."

The Colonel nodded. "Excellent. The B2 and P2 groups are a bonus. I'm glad my predecessor maintained funding to keep the Type VI models in storage. And PR?"

"Cover stories are in place. By preventing new memory formation, they'll be easier subjects for trained Grade Three MMW implantation. They won't remember a thing." The blond woman's voice was tinged with regret.

The Nazzadi woman's face took on a sympathetic look. "I understand that from an outsider's viewpoint, what we're doing is horrific. But so would the casualties in CATO if we didn't do this, or the long term strategic implications if we let the Dagonites maintain control."

She sighed.

"It's all about the strategic implications. Some people would ask if we have the right to make a thousand people suffer so that one million can live. And I would argue that we don't have a right _not_ to. Necessity is a harsh mistress. It's what distinguishes real life from fiction. If this was a story, we'd be able to wish upon a star, believe in ourselves, rescue the prince and save the world. But the world doesn't work that way. Honourable warriors are wiped out by those who use all the assets they have, and if you're hot-blooded, you can't go beyond the impossible and defy probability and break the heavens."

She turned to leave.

"What you can do is get yourself and people who rely upon you killed. I've seen it far too much."

~'/|\'~

Kaji looked away from the window, a slight grin on his face.

"Well, that was an eventful day," he said, staring over at Gendo Ikari, who stood, impassively, at his desk, his eyes concealed by the way that the artificial life in the geodome reflected off his AR glasses. The case lay on the desk, sealed, the internal wards still up.

Kaji tilted his head slightly. "It was because of that, wasn't it," he said, trying to get a response.

There was silence, as the two men stared at each other across Gendo's vast office. Slowly, Kaji walked over to the table, keeping his eyes locked on the Representative.

"It's but a fragment of the whole... but I think a fragment is enough. It's alive, I'm sure of it, even though it's encased in diamond and trapped within the _Bah'ri Diß_. I could feel it." He moved his gaze to the case. "It's the key to the Human Iteracy Project, isn't it?"

Gendo then flipped open the case, revealing the black and yellow of the artefact, with its Tsabian occult symbols lit on the surface as the active binding held. Within the central crystal, a figure could be seen, vaguely foetal, sealed within.

Gendo then spoke. "Yes. This is the High Priest of the Outer Gods."

They stared down at the object, as the thing sealed within squirmed.

"I shall not say his name so close to him, but you know to whom I refer."

~'/|\'~

It was Tuesday, and they had finally released Shinji from the Ashcroft Clinic, after they had failed to detect any major consequences from... well, from whatever had happened. Shinji wasn't quite sure what had happened (but how it had hurt!), and Dr Akagi, when she had come to visit him, had been remarkably incoherent about the specifics, mutterings about impossibilities.

"... and then she told me that," Shinji put on a voice, "well, of course we never put two pilots in the same entry plug. I mean, it's only a highly sensitive war machine controlled by a direct noetic interface specifically calibrated to a single pilot, so of course it will be fine when you put someone calibrated for a different system in the same machine as the intended pilot. No, of course, we just have those pilot profiles there for fun!" Shinji looked around the classroom, then sighed, turning back to Toja and Ken. "It went on like that for a while, using rather excessive amounts of sarcasm. Long story short; they're never doing that again, we're never to do that again, and what the hell were we thinking."

Ken gave a suppressed groan. "Oh man, I can't believe I missed everything. I mean, now I'm never going to get to go in an Eva entry plug. I feel like I've been cheated my look around, you know. And I missed that battle and everything!"

There was a snort from Toja. "Knowing you, you'd have been busy mourning the loss of all those ships and stuff. You'd probably have been on the floor, sobbing, one arm held in the air filming. Of course, with the other hand, you'd have been busy..." He noticed Shinji's glare, and tailed off.

"Did you even pay attention to what I was saying? What are you, stupid? You're lucky not to have to do this. It hurts. It always ends up hurting. And they ended up bringing me all the classwork I needed to catch up on in the Clinic, so I didn't even get to have a rest."

Ken's face screwed up. "But they're so awesome..."

"Then you're an idiot."

Toja patted the other boy on the head patronisingly. "Don't get upset. It normally takes him a few days to get back to his old self after this kind of thing. A bit more snappy than usual, though."

"If I'm being snappy, it's because I'm surrounded by idiots who think it would be fun to be put through a skull splitting migraine then locked up in a mental ward for a few days while they run checks for mental contamination," snapped Shinji. He held up a hand. "I'm sorry."

Toja shook his head. "You shouldn't be. Ignore him. He's just being an insensitive jerk."

"No, I'm just being irritable." He pinched the bridge of his nose, trying to change the subject. "So, what did you two end up doing while everything was going on?"

Ken shrugged. "Not much. They basically took us to a sort of games room. We played some DoEA III..."

"... which I totally crushed you at," pointed out Toja. "You were very cocky right up until I got that flank attack."

Ken crossed his arms and looked away. "I still don't get how the hell you managed that. I had your landing zones locked down. How did you managed to slaughter my main comms centre?"

Toja deliberately flashed his incisors. "Assassins, you forgot about assassins. You only had basic troopers staffing the facility, and you were too busy stopping me landing more Replicas that you didn't notice that I'd noticed the gap in your sensor grid. Stealthed right in, then hacked your sensors, which allowed me to turn off your AA radar in a narrow arc and land all those troops I'd cued up."

"No, that's not right. I had an AWACS up in the air, too. I know that you took my radar down, because that was obvious when the Comms Centre didn't let me select it, but the AWACS didn't spot it."

Toja only smirked at that.

"No, seriously, tell me that."

"I don't think so. Tell you want, we'll have another game..." he paused, "can't do it tonight, I've got the homework I didn't do yesterday... well, we'll see if I can do it, then get online." He cocked his head at Shinji. "Hey, Shinji, do you play DoEA III? Want to see if you can slap some sense into Ken, because he's an idiot. Despite being a military freak, he's actually rather bad at RTSes."

"Am not."

"Are too. Remember the last LAN game? You got slaughtered, even though we let you have extra resources at the start."

"That's because RPGs are better, anyway," retorted Ken. "Better graphics, better immersion, a proper MMO system."

Shinji coughed. "Let's back up a bit. DoEA III?"

"Doctrine of Eternal Aeons 3. It's a Real Time Strategy game for the PC. Basically, you're controlling an army. There are three factions, the humans, the not-Migou-honestly, and the orcs-in-space; pretty standard RTS fare, all in all. The AI is awesome; they've got the individual AI for your units down really well; they take cover properly."

Shinji shrugged. "Meh. I'm more a Syzergy 2 player."

Ken moaned. "Hurgh. Consoles are worse. The graphics are worse and nothing quite controls like a proper, desk-mounted AR scheme."

"Well, then, sometime you can let Misato kick your arse at... wait a moment. I'm trying not to let you anywhere near her. Ignore that. So that was it? You got to sit around playing video games while I got a splitting headache and bleeding from my eyes, mouth and ears. Pfft." He sighed. "Life just isn't fair."

"Well, someone else wanted to use the PCs after a few games, so we ended up watching a documentary on Iceland."

"Iceland?" said Shinji, in a disbelieving tone of voice, one eyebrow raised.

Ken shuddered. "Don't do that. It makes you look creepy. It was pretty interesting, not your normal InBroad rubbish. All about the Dagonite conquest from the Migou and the defences and stuff."

Toja nodded. "Yeah, all about the Dagonite conquest from the Migou and the defences. I thought it was going to be boring and rubbish, but it was pretty interesting."

Shinji grunted. "As I said, not fair."

Toja grinned wide. "I can tell you something else that's unfair. You're going to have to see more of that girl. She may have been hot, but you could use her personality to, like, cut metal. Like some kind of acid or... help me out here Ken, what's the name of that stuff you use to, like shape, metal."

Ken cocked his head to one side. "A nanofactory?"

"No, when you've got the thing out, and want to polish it."

"You recycle it, then make a new one. The 'notes you get for the recycling mean that you're only paying for the energy, and that's pretty cheap."

"No, idiot. Damn it. This is going to annoy me all day if I can't remember the word."

"What word?" called out Hikary, from the other side if the room, eyes on Toja.

"What's the stuff you use to polish and grind stuff down?" Toja replied.

She sighed, "Do you mean sandpaper?"

He snapped his fingers. "That's the word!" He saw that Hikary was still staring at him. "What?"

"It means that I know that you haven't done your Historical Literature homework, Toja", she snapped back. "If you'd been paying attention, you'd picked it up from reading."

The Nazzadi flapped his hand in the direction of the _amlati_. "I just didn't have much time this weekend, you know." He turned back to the other boys. "Anyway, you're going to have to spend tonnes of time with someone with a personality like sandpaper, grinding away at your nerves."

Shinji frowned. "What are you talking about? Who said she wasn't coming here?"

It was, of course at that exact moment that Asuka Langley Soryu confidently strode through the door, thus once again proving that reality was a bit of a dick, and excessively fond of irony.

Ken and Toja groaned simultaneously, bringing their hands into contact with their faces with a notable slap.

~'/|\'~

White spoke.

"It proceeds. Another Herald slain, and the chain of inheritance is pulled closer."

Blue spoke.

"Indeed."

Red spoke, a hint of agitation in her voice.

"But the way it proceeds is not liked."

White spoke.

"Explain."

Red spoke.

"How was it that it was not known what the Navy was using in that military project? That should not have been possible."

Green spoke.

"The involvement of a higher power is suspected?"

Red spoke.

"The involvement of _Gendo Ikari_ is suspected."

Yellow spoke.

"Excessive paranoia is being displayed. Fact: we do not control everything. Fact: we must rely upon agents, who are fallible and cannot be guaranteed to be loyal to us exclusively. Fact: the security on projects, whether Naval or otherwise is immense. The plan must remain flexible."

Green spoke.

"That is true. Excessive rigidity will only lead to breakage. A failure, and that which shall be broken shall be humanity."

Red spoke.

"Then how did Project Daeva get its collective hands upon the extra-dimensional entities known as Shoggoths? Consider this; in the Necronomicon, Abdul Alhazred denied most feverishly..."

Green spoke.

"... that they could exist on this planet. Yes. It is known. Alhazred was wrong. Empirical evidence exists that they were present in Antarctica; both the Dyer Papers and the Danforth Notes confirm this, and let the First Innsmouth Incident not be forgotten."

White spoke.

"Yet it would not be wise to dismiss Alhazred so quickly. Remember the name appears in the ancient histories of the unknowable Tsab. Policy must be to note correlations whenever they occur. A precipice is being walked here; a fall, and all shall fall."

Blue spoke.

"Agreed. And this is what is worrying. It should not need reminding that Antarctica is solidly under Migou control,and has been since the start of the Second Arcanotech War. The New Earth Government Navy would not be able to extract arcanoxenobiological samples from there."

Red spoke.

"There is a ninety-seven point zero one three percent probability that the Migou have cleansed the site in its entirety. That is why the subject was raised."

Yellow spoke.

"Nevertheless, the paranoia displayed is excessive. There are no known links links to Gendo Ikari, when there are so many players in this game; albeit so many unaware of their participation."

White spoke.

"Absolute control is impossible. Absolute precision is required. Absolute knowledge is required. Absolute knowledge is impossible. These facts must be faced, and overcome them as best as can be achieved, by eliminating as many variables as possible. Control must be maintained"

There was silence.

Green spoke.

"Do the Nine Daughters of Ægir still slumber? Does control still remain?"

White spoke.

"Control remains. The Nine Daughters of Ægir must be concealed until they are deployed, so that the Texts are fulfilled. Remember this; the Texts are not our prophecy. We seek to corrupt them from their original meaning, and for our control over the Celestial Concordance to come about, the initial conditions must proceed as prophesied. Hence, the Nine must wake before the One, and if we have replaced the Nine with our own, who fulfil the criteria, then the One cannot wake."

Green spoke.

"Agreed."

Blue spoke.

"Agreed."

Yellow spoke.

"Remember; CATO is soon. Only one more."

Red spoke.

"And then _Xue'Vehulu'Ia'Ia_ shall be made whole, and under control."

Green spoke.

"Not to mention the peripheral benefits. CATO shall remove one major threat to the plan."

Yellow spoke.

"Indeed. It need not be reminded that the consequences should anyone else control Apotheosis be dire."

White spoke.

"Everything we do. Everything we have given. It is all for the species as a whole.

~'/|\'~


	12. Chapter 10: What Must be Done to Win?

**Chapter 10**

What Must be Done to Win?

~'/|\'~

Tokita, the disgraced Chief Engineer of the similarly disgraced Project Daeva sat slumped in his chair, fingers tapping against his front teeth.

Of course, this wasn't going to be his office for much longer. When the mighty fell, they fell hard. Project Daeva was being vivisected before his eyes. The Engel Project had already leapt for most of his best arcanotechnicians, and other groups were going for the rest. He had just had to fill in the transfer form for his best arcanobiologist to Project Amunet, that bunch of fucking necromancers who dressed their actions up as arcane applied physics, and he had had just about enough. They were going to be moving him out tomorrow, to "house custody", while the Registered Technology Enforcement division of the Federal Security Bureau asked him very pointed questions and tried to find out as much as they could about the Type-S

Yes, he hadn't registered with the FSB for the use of the extradimensional organism. That was sort of the point of a _secret_ weapons project. He had received permission from his superiors from the Nay; permission which had vanished all too quickly after the Chicago-2 fiasco. So what? Project Evangelion hadn't registered whatever the hell those things were, and the Engel Project,he knew, normally only went after permission after the first field tests.

But they were Ashcroft groups.

The Ashcroft Foundation. That mass which switched between cancer and symbiote at its own will. It had the thrice-damned monopoly on the D-Engine and the A-Pod, which mean it controlled all modern power generation. The last nuclear fission plants had been shut down in between the First and Second Arcanotech Wars, hanging on slightly longer than the coal plants, which even now mouldered outside of the arcologies, often home to small communities of Rainers, those barely registered, barely supervised transients who dwelt outside of the safety of proper habitation. The Foundation had drained the countries in the New United Nations dry, the Nazzadi engineer had heard, and forced the issue of the Second Cold War by wrecking the economies of the gas-and-oil-dependent states with the D-Engine, then the old manufacturing economies of the East with the nanofactory. From what Tokita had learnt of pre-AW1 history, the recession which had resulted from the mass unemployment and government defaults had been localised to the countries who hadn't accepted in the Foundation, bartering their wealth for massive infrastructure projects and the insidious influence of the Ashcroft Advisers.

Because, after all, everyone knew that the best people to "advise" (and by advise, it was more like "issue ultimatums to") a government were the appointed, unelected representatives of a massive transnational corporation that didn't even issue shares and was the sixth largest economy in the world in 2050. Sure.

And so it came to the modern day, where the NEG Global Debt to the Ashcroft Foundation was greater than Global GDP. But they were kind creditors, weren't they. They didn't call in the debts, and they charged a negative rate of interest. All they asked for was near total autonomy from the practical rule of law, entire areas of major arcologies under their control where they enforced control, not the NEG (Tokita thought of the London-2 Geodome, of its near identical twin, the Tokyo-3 Geofront, and of the C2 Headquarters, which was practically an arcology in its own right), and nearly unlimited influence over government figures.

It was enough to make you vomit.

And so their Projects, with excellent salaries, the best medical care, both mental and physical, in the world, had come and poached almost all of the staff he had so carefully built up. Oddly enough, none of them had gone to Project Evangelion. No, those bastards had just swooped in and taken the plans for the mD/D Hybrid Engine from the Navy, in return for some unspecified aid in the future. The mD/D Hybrid Engine; superior even to the innovation of the Type-S. It improved on the standard D-Engine, still basically the same device which Czeny had designed using the theory calculated by Ashcroft and Yi, notably, allowing a distributed grid without the whole issue of space-time rips, which usually occurred when too many D-Rifts were bought into close proximity. And now it was going to vanish into Project Evangelion, into the Project which had destroyed the people who had actually invented it.

Oh yes.

Tokita was quite sure that everything that had happened was all the fault of Project Evangelion. It wasn't a coincidence, after all, that their Mass Production Evangelion, the only such model they had built in all the time that they'd had, was present for the unveiling of the Araska. It wasn't a coincidence that a Herald had attacked just in time for them to show off in front of all of the top brass that they were the superior model, in a way that left them almost completely undamaged while the C2 Fleet was wrecked.

And it certainly wasn't a coincidence that the Type-S went rampant exactly as the Evangelion approached it.

It was probably their Director of Research and Development, the disgraced engineer pondered. She had tried to sabotage them via the medium of opinion, in the demonstration where she kept on claiming, without proof, that the Araska was unsafe. And, surprise surprise, it went wrong just as she had predicted. Suspiciously like she had predicted. She had probably taken out the nanites infused into the flesh of the Type-S, the ones that kept the organism under control, probably by introducing a flaw into the computer code that managed the distributed network, given the way that the runaway growth had proceeded. The Evangelion Director of Operations probably wasn't involved, though, he thought; too stupid and rash for such subtlety. It was sensible to keep track of the staff of your rivals, and her records clearly showed why Evangelion wanted someone like her. She was practically made for the job.

Tokita suddenly knew that there was someone else in the room, from the way that the acoustics of his breathing shifted.

He looked up.

A women stared back at him, eyes boring deep into him. She tilted her head slightly, and spoke;

"I believe, Tokita, that you would like both a talk and a new job."

He stared at the woman blankly, hand groping under his desk for the panic button.

"Who are you? What are you doing here?"

The woman's expression did not change. "You are bitter about the loss of your Project, your humiliation by Project Evangelion and the shame of having released Shoggoths into the wild. Funding will be provided in return for your sole allegiance and your servitude to the maintenance of control."

He found the button and pressed it.

Nothing happened.

Red smiled broadly, and took a step towards the terrified engineer.

~'/|\'~

"You know, I would have said a while ago that you're going a bit far," said Toja, idly.

Ken shrugged. "What changed?"

"Now I know you are. Way too far."

"Why?"

Toja sighed. "Use your brain, Ken. I know you have one. She's an Evangelion pilot. You're taking pictures of her and selling them off. At some point, someone is going to catch you with your camera, and if you're very lucky, it will just be her. If you're not... well, do you want to have another chat with the Foundation, or worse with the FSB or OIS. Or Hikary, if she finds out about those pictures you got in the changing rooms."

"It's fine. I locked the files for no-sharing. They won't even be able to transfer them from their PCPUs without effort."

"Listen. You're being really stupid. Do you want to be expelled or something, or worse? Give it up."

"Oh, don't worry," said Ken, airily. "I'm not taking pictures any more. I'm just using stills from," he dropped his voice, "the security cameras around school. You know, the low sec ones that're really old; not the newer ones. They won't be able to trace me."

The Nazzadi's jaw dropped. "You're a moron. I want nothing more to do with this. I know nothing of this. Right, maybe before the punching incident I'd have helped you, but after the OIS thing... I never want to go near them again. I still have nightmares from being in the room, with them asking all those questions." His voice dropped. "Almost as bad as the red glow from that _thing_. No fucking way ever again."

Ken's eyes darted around. "Oh, shit. Damn, I didn't realise that. Yes, I'm stopping it right now." He paused. "Oh god."

There was a brief silence.

"Out of curiosity, how much have you made?" asked Toja, his voice purposefully innocent.

Ken pulled up a document on his wrist PCPU, datafiles streaming across his glasses as he scrolled down. "Almost one hundred T-notes. Yeah, it was good." There was a moment of breathless silence. "Toja."

"Yes?"

"The objection would surely only be to pictures of her, you know, like real pictures..."

The boy narrowed his red eyes. "Maybe. What are you getting at?"

"There wouldn't be any objections if we just used the pre-existing images, took some pictures around the school, and then edited in the shots of her, adjusting for lighting and stuff, would there?"

The silence extended.

"Yes." Toja rolled his eyes. "Yes, there would be. Just give it up."

Ken made a frustrated noise. "Fine."

~'/|\'~

Timana, the head engineer of the team assigned to Unit 01, looked up at the knock on his door.

"Come in," he called out, without looking up from the model of the Evangelion that floated before his eyes. He pulled his fingers apart, magnifying the join where the RA-09 plate meshed with RA-10, seeing if the issue with the carapace-dermal interface had been fixed.

There was a cough from in front of him. He looked up.

"Oh, it's you, Lieutenant Ibuki." He flapped a hand over the desk. "Please, have a seat. I'll just be a few minutes."

_And... yes, it's bonded properly this time. The issue with the stresses from the missile packs shouldn't arise._

He shrunk the projection back down, down to a 28mm figurine on his desk, then took off the AR glasses, massaging the bridge of his nose.

"Sorry to leave you waiting," he told the young woman. "I was just checking that we'd resolved the problem with the new Type-C armour."

"And have you?" asked Maya.

The man nodded. "Yes. It wasn't vital, but if the problem hadn't been fixed, then there was an outside chance that firing those new missile packs that the Type-C added might cause slippage between the dermal layer of the ACXB organism and the the ceramic plates."

"Well, that is good news," she replied, then hesitated. "What do the engineering teams think of the Type-C?" Maya asked.

"In all honesty, it's a slight improvement for us. The Type-B is very close to the Type-C anyway; the Zero Zero team are much more thrilled with us, as they'd been operating with a hybrid Type-A/Type-B before this refit. Really the only changes are slightly better modularity, those M-Packs on the shoulders, and thicker chest armour."

She cocked her head. "Really? They didn't replace the integral weapons with those installed on the MP Eva?"

"No, Lieutenant." The man sighed. "Don't get me started on Unit 02. The Berlin-2 team have transferred over here fine, and they're... well sort of professionally annoyed at what happened. They've removed the Plasmathrower prototype completely and installed one of the Lightning Cannons that Unit 01 uses. It's malfunctioned twice in battlefield conditions, despite good performance in the lab. Miniaturisation issues, they say. They had to refit the entire arm, including reducing the local immunosuppressants to allow tissue regrowth, to repair the damage from the exploding prototype." The Nazzadi shuddered. "And they've had to replace several armour plates due to XB contamination. Is there something about the presence of the Third Child which gets the Units contaminated by extra-dimensional entities?" he asked, in an aggrieved tone.

Maya blushed slightly. "I don't think it's his fault," she protested. "It's just that the Heralds are biological nightmares." She shook her head. "How many spares do we have for each of the Units, anyway?"

Timana made a frustrated noise. "It's not as bad as it was just after Mot," he began, "but we only have one full set of spares for each Evangelion. Both Zero Zero and Zero One are right on the edge; we have the Type-C plus one full set, and that's all. The Type-B was pretty much too contaminated to use again, even though it's cross-compatible. Did I mention that one set of Zero One's armour was undergoing abiogenesis!" he added, in an exasperated tone.

"Yes, you did, Timana," Maya answered. "At the last meeting. But only one full set? That's not good."

"Quite. The Heralds are attacking faster than we can built fresh replacements. We're suffering from a lack of economies of scale, basically. We have to get them made in Navy Capital-Grade nanofactories, and we're only scheduled so much time. If we had our own plant, we could handle it, but there's no way," the man with a voice of authority, "that we could get a dedicated plant. They're needed for the Navy; they can lay a frigate backbone down in the time it takes for us to make a new breastplate." He shook his head. "From what I've heard, the Zero Two team are better off; they have at least three breastplate sections, which we could... that's Zero Zero and us 'we', by the way... can use, now that Zero Zero and Zero One have been upgraded to use the Type-C armour. But even they're suffering from a lack of left-arm sections, due to the fact that they've had to scrap the PP1-P, which had been integrated"

Maya nodded. "Thank you," she said. "I'll let you get back to what you were doing; I just was asked to get a personal evaluation of the states of the Units," she added, as she left.

The Evangelion Project had been chronically underfunded since before she had been transferred here by the Foundation, the young woman thought as she walked back through the hallways. A sudden new flood of funding had come after they had killed that first Herald, but money could not buy time. That was the problem they kept up running up against, and the young woman knew that Dr Akagi had been keeping back something about the armour since coming back from Chicago-2. The Director of Research and Development had been the one who had personally told her to get a first hand account from the Chief Engineer of the Zero One team, even when she had all his reports in front of her, accessible with the wave of a hand.

She shrugged, as she entered the changing room adjacent to the sterile area which the detailed Magi work was done. Oh, sure, the supercomputers could be operated from conventional AR panels and even antique keyboards, but that wasn't optimal for the really high-level analysis work.

She began to unfasten her uniform, the loose slacks the Magi technicians wore on days they knew they would have to do a dive.

The interface between the human brain and the horrifically complicated unison of the organic, the arcane and the machine that was the Magi could not be properly utilised if there was another barrier between them. Inside the Magi, the foibles of the human mind, its inability to comprehend higher dimensional objects, its tendency to get confused by a mere hypercube; all those were washed away by the Magi. The mind-machine interface which the Magi used was another spin-off from the Evangelion Project, a parallel evolution to the Engel Synthesis Interface implanted into the central nervous system of every single Engel pilot on the planet. With it, the brain was no longer restricted to its component neurons; tasks could be instead be performed by the Magi.

Maya removed the grafted synthflesh from her scalp, exposing the sub-dermal interface layer below. With great care, the synthflesh and the hair that grew from the engineered organism was placed in her storage facility. She winced slightly as she ran her hands over the ceramic composite that was bonded directly to her skull, warmed to body temperature yet so alien in feel to flesh. Underneath the hard outer layer, where the top of her skull should have been, lay layers of microelectronics, cortical jacks hanging down into her brain tissue like silver icicles.

In the initial trials, the brain had even delegated autonomous functions to the more efficient Magi. Dr Akagi's mother had almost died in the first trials; other technicians had. The Etemennigur defence system maintained a necessary level of separation between the technician and the Magi, but the alien view of reality (or, perhaps, the more accurate view) when connected to the supercomputer trio took its toll. Extracted its price. Claimed its victims.

Magi technicians burned out _fast_, at a rate comparable to that of front-line Engel pilots.

Maya winced as she stepped into the cleanser, grabbing the handles at the sides. She really hated this part, she really did. All her hair stood on end, as a static charge built. She kept her eyes closed, even though the permanent contacts protected them, and waited, as the machine stripped away her top layer of skin. The sudden blast of cold air on the newly revealed epidermis told her that it was complete, even as the faint scent of ozone filled her nostrils.

The woman groped in front of her for the immersion suit (really a glorified name for a short wetsuit), not opening her eyes until she had found it. The donning of this garment was nothing more than ritual by now. Without prompting, she went into the newly opened clean room, and lay down in the coffin-like vat of clear fluid, thick and viscous.

_Oxygen mask... check. Test function... and there's the hiss, good._

"Breather is fine from this end," she announced into the mask.

"Oxygen supply reads green from this end," Makota announced from the monitoring facility, on the other side of the black glass which filled one side of the room, a discontinuity in this place of sterile whiteness. "Releasing the Demon."

The Demon was technically the DMIN, the Direct Magi Interface Node. But as Makota watched Maya fasten the helmet, the thick cable snaking out from the back; one end into the Magi, the other splitting into the tendrils which fed into her brain, he really felt that the nickname was more apt. The Nazzadi was not qualified to operate the Magi in this way, and he preferred to keep it like this. Part of it was that he would really rather not undergo surgery which removed notable amounts of the skull, leaving a hole in it like a newborn infant's, covering the hole with ceramics, and sticking two-way probes into his brain. But he also guessed that it was something cultural. Humans, _homo sapiens sapiens_ would do things to themselves that people like him, _homo sapiens nazzadi_ would not consider.

It probably came from not having been created as a weapon of war by alien fungoid insectoids to wipe out your base genetic material.

And so he watched the neural feed, looking for anything that would mean that he would have to pull the plug. Meanwhile, below, the woman's limbs twitched as Maya began swimming through the true virtual reality which the Magi generated, trying to fit together the data gathered on Yam into the models based on the observations of the previous Heralds.

Lal had told him something, he remembered, suddenly, with a pang of guilt. He hadn't thought of Lal in a while, ever since the man's nervous breakdown. Gurpreet had mentioned that he was out of the Clinic, now, away from the Magi. Now, what had he said?

Oh yes.

"_I think,"_ he had said, explaining what the Magi felt like, "_and my thoughts cross the barrier into the synapses of the machine, just as the good doctor,"_ and that had been said with heavy sarcasm and an ironic twist of the neck, Makota thought, "_intended. But what I cannot shake, and what hints at things to come, is that thoughts cross back. In my dreams, the sensibility of the machine invades the periphery of my consciousness: dark, rigid, cold, alien. Evolution is at work here, but just what is evolving remains to be seen."_

No, Makota did not trust the Magi at all. They were a tool, but a tool which was potentially dangerous to its users must be watched. But then again, so much of what the Evangelion Project did was like that. He hadn't expected to encounter this when he had accepted the promotion, recruited from among the arcanotechnicians of the New Earth Army to the Ashcroft Foundation. Something inside him screamed that some sacrifices were too great, that you shouldn't play around with peoples' brains, that it would be better to let the Migou win and wipe out the collective human subspecies than lose everything that made us different from them.

The Migou made their mecha from an unholy hybrid of machine and organism, transplanted brains from organism to organism, made decisions based purely upon their alien logic rather than based on any care for their men. They were alien monstrosities, utterly inhuman, but intelligent; more intelligent than mankind, in many ways. Cold, methodical and precise.

What became difficult at times was distinguishing any single thing that they did which the New Earth Government would not go.

Such thoughts Makota kept to himself. If he expressed them out loud, when employed by such a sensitive project, he'd probably be disappeared by the OIS or the Ashcroft Foundation. If anything reappeared; well, it certainly wouldn't be unmodified, possessing all the same memories and beliefs.

And the fact that he could think those thoughts was the only proof he had that something akin to that had not already happened him already. And technically all it meant that the hypothetical people building his memories were _smart_.

~'/|\'~

Second Lieutenant Asuka Langley Soryu, designated pilot of Evangelion Unit 02, Slayer of a Herald was being bored to the point of insanity by the inanity of the babble of teenagers.

_Gods, they're just so stupid._

And, in a related and somewhat more direct fashion, she was also being annoyed to the point of violence by the gratuitous amount of junk letters and messages to her PCPU that they were sending her. Not only was she having to run a tight spam filter on the hand-held device, the idiots were resorting to meatspace spam, clogging up her assigned locker with paper jammed into every corner. An additional aggravation was that they weren't even bothering to hand-write the letters; they'd just chosen a personalised "Hand-Written" font and printed them out. There was such a thing as effort after all.

_And_, on top of all that, she was being forced to sit through basic ASCIET classes; not even undergraduate stuff. The stupidity of most of the human population amazed her, sometimes. Well, a lot of the time. Pretty much always, come to think about it.

Some people might call her intolerant of others, and perhaps suggest that she might consider lowering her standards. She would immediately dismiss them as willing to settle for less, and suspect that they had anti-intellectualist tendencies.

Of course, she was not about to let that show. If they were going to make sure that she sat her ASCIETs, even if she already had a better qualification, so that she would mingle with others and undergo the mandatory continually assessed socialisation testing, then she was going to do the best that she could.

Because if she didn't, they would probably be sarcastic at her and suggest that she failed at normal human interaction.

And she wouldn't have that. Couldn't have that.

She had been placed in the same class as the other two Children. The presence of the Third Child, Shinji, was annoying her, especially since she was forced to live under the same roof as him. She didn't particularly like him, and she was fairly sure that the feeling was mutual. Her queries to why she was staying with Misato and him had been brushed aside when they told her that any Children not resident in London-2 would be staying there, due to 'security reasons'. Nevertheless, at least he understood somewhat life as an Evangelion pilot was like, despite his inexperience, unlike the rest of the masses at the Academy.

Which bought her neatly onto the subject of the First Child, Rei Ayanami.

_You can see just from looking at her that _she _is not a brand new pilot._

Of course, the fact that she's the First Child, while I'm only the Second, might also indicate that she has been doing it longer.

Asuka mentally rolled her eyes at that comment, and tuned back into the conversation.

"... and, yeah, it really stunk!" said a blond (rather plump, if the athletic Asuka would say so) girl, a thin pair of AR glasses perched on her nose.

"I know _exactly_ what you mean!" replied another one, who would have been described as 'mousy' were it not for her coal black skin and red eyes.

"But you got the results, yes?"

"I'm sorry," interjected Asuka, politely despite the boredom she was suffering, "but do you know where the First Child... that is, Rei, is?"

She received shrugs all around.

"No-one really... knows what she does or where she is," the blond one said, picking her words carefully. "She's... odd."

"Even for a White. There's something about her that sets your teeth on edge," added another girl, with streaks of blue in her hair. "Like she's watching you. Really really watching you."

"There's this way that she can _give you her full attention_," muttered the Nazzadi.

Asuka frowned at that last comment.

"Normally, you see, when someone's talking to you, they're also thinking of what they're going to do next, whether there's any good food for lunch, whether they'll be able to get some games in this evening. You know, thinking stuff," the girl continued, softly. "She doesn't. She looks at you, and she's thinking of you. It's like..." she wrung her hands together, "help me out here."

"Like when your father caught you doing something where you were really small, and he would glare at you even before he'd entered the room where you'd broken something because he'd heard the smash, only you didn't know that because you were like five or something," the blue-haired girl whispered, body instinctively curling up in the memory.

"My dad never did that," said the plump blond one. "That was always my mum's role."

There was a subtle change in the air.

"... but the principle remains the same," she continued, hurriedly. "It's a feeling of shame and guilt, as if she disapproves of you interrupting her time and you should go and find something better to go do. It's the same sort of feeling that..."

"What are you lot talking about?" asked Hikary from over their shoulders, a subtle tone of menace in her voice.

"... uh, nothing, Hikary," she continued almost seamlessly, with only the implication that the individual who she had about to mention had somehow appeared (with near perfect comic timing) behind her. "Asuka here was just asking if we knew where Rei Ayanami was."

"And you were going to tell her, were you?" the _amlati_ continued, in the same tone of voice.

"No, because we don't know where she is," answered the Nazzadi, muscled tensed. Asuka found this somewhat perplexing; the class representatives on TV seemed to be studious, slightly mocked teachers pets, not the figure of fear that the slight xenomix with her pigtails seemed to be.

"And you weren't 'spreading rumours about a fellow classmate', were you?" continued the grey-skinned girl.

"Of course not," the other girls chorused.

Hikary smiled wide. "Good. Just as well, really. Come on, Asuka. I'll show you where she is most lunchtimes."

As the German got up to leave, "Have fun with the Tyrant," was whispered by one of the other girls, in a tone so soft that Asuka couldn't recognise which one it was.

They walked down the corridors for a while, in silence.

"I have to say," Asuka said, a smile creeping up her face, "I was rather impressed by that."

"People just need to be reminded that there are certain standards to be followed," Hikary replied. She sighed. "Look, whatever they told you about Rei, it's not really true. She's just not a people person."

"You know her?" Asuka queried. If the _amlati_ girl was friends with the _sidoci_, it would both be an easy pre-existing friends network, and useful.

"No. No-one really does, but you pick things up when you've been class representative for seven years."

"Seven years." Asuka was surprised by that. The other girls hadn't seemed to like Hikary, but she had to be popular to keep on being re-elected. "That's pretty impressive."

The other girl shrugged. "I get good grades and I can organise things, unlike most of the class." She smiled faintly. "And I'm the class champion of DoEA III, although that's not really the right criterion to be selecting people for a position of authority."

"DoEA III?" The red-haired girl frowned. "Oh yes, that PC game."

"The design team graduated from this Academy. They use us as beta testers and balance for patches, and they made it an interclass tournament. We've held the record ever since III came out, and we held it for II, as well." Hikary cocked her head. "You play?"

"Nah," she shrugged. "I'm a console gamer; Syzygy 2. Fighting games are just better."

"You're wrong, you know," the other girl responded, "but we'll just have to let it slip." She paused. "What were we talking about before?"

"You were telling me things about Rei Ayanami."

"Oh yes." The grey-skinned girl sighed. "Yes, it's not her fault. Some of us xenomixes are just born as _sidoci_; about 1%, as I recall. They're always a bit strange. Well, she's a bit stranger than most," she admitted. "She's been here all through, but we really don't know anything about her. The L2 Representative is the one who visits her guardian-teacher conferences, and we haven;t seen any other family," and then she gave a somewhat bitter laugh, rather unlike her normal demeanour, "although, since this is an Ashcroft Academy, it's not as if people who've lost parents are uncommon."

Asuka's eyes widened. Two questions were due to be asked, and she asked the one she thought was more important. "Wait? She's related to Shinji?"

Hikary frowned. "I've been trying to work that out myself. There's something about the jawline that's common to both of them, but if you look closely, past the fact that she's a _sidoci_, and you can see that she's doesn't have exclusively Asian features. There's something about the eyes. But, logically, if they're related, they'd have different mothers. A Nazzadi built from European genestock, probably, or maybe a second generation mix between European and Asian genestock."

The Migou had not build the Nazzadi fleet from scratch; the black-skinned, red-eyed constructs had been based on samples of human genetic material. What was fascinating for Nazzadi genealogists was the fact that the fungi from Yuggoth had even maintained a high degree of continuity between gene sources, to keep their mass produced army realistically diverse. There were genetic testing services which tracked the area where the sample biological material had come from. There had even been cases where the people taken had proven to be recent, and there were living _homo sapiens sapiens_ relatives; where the truth of what had happened to Great Uncle Jim-Bob, who disappeared from his car late one night, finally came out. It was still infrequent enough that it made the local news, but it had a small-but-noticeable effect on human-Nazzadi relations, as a sharp reminder that the two branches of humanity were so very close.

"But I've seen pictures of the Representative," pointed out Asuka, "and he doesn't really look much like either of them."

"Shinji has his eyes," stated Hikary. "You see it sometimes, if he raises an eyebrow. It completely shifts his face."

That in turn caused one of Asuka's eyebrows to raise. "You've been "seeing" that idiot's eyes," she stated, somewhat in disdain of the other girl's bad taste.

Hikary shook her head. "No. He's nice enough, when he's not having time absent... I hope you don't intend to get beaten up in those things..."

"I'm better than he is," the red-haired girl stated.

"... but he's not that attractive. For one, he's built like a stick, no muscle anywhere. I bet he forgets to feed himself; he looks like the sort."

There was an odd look in Hikary's eyes as she said that.

"How far is this place anyway?" declared Asuka. "Does she really trek all the way over here in all her free time?"

"Just two more slights of stairs. She goes up to the roof and reads, as far as I can tell."

"Why did you find this out, actually," she asked curiously.

The other girl shrugged. "My father always says that knowledge is power, and that knowledge is useful. Mind you, he's the Ashcroft Representative on the AEB, so he says things like that a lot."

"AEB?"

"Arcology Education Board."

The eyebrow returned to its elevated position. "And you wonder why you keep on being made class representative," Asuka smirked.

"It's not like that at all," Hikary protested, as they emerged into the fake sunlight of the arcology dome, only about thirty metres above them at this point. The reinforced spires that supported the mass of buildings above them, strengthening the roof, could be seen to surround them. The Academy was in the middle of this level, at the centre of the dome.

Rei Ayanami sat in on one of the benches on this roof, beneath a fake sun, a fake wind blowing through her hair. It was scheduled that there would be a slight shower of water from the ceiling at precisely 13:45 today, lasting for 15 minutes, before stopping. She had noted this down, and was aware of the risk of getting wet should she prove to be outside at that point in time.

But for now, she was reading.

_Sol shrugged in the darkness,_ the words on the page said. This was a real book, too, manufactured in a nanofactory, but the words printed rather than just displayed on a screen. _'I really know nothing about politics... or the Core's accuracy in predicting things. I'm a minor scholar from a small college on a backwater world. But I have a feeling that something terrible is in store for us... that some rough beast is slouching towards Bethlehem waiting to be born.'_

Duré smiled. 'Yeats', he said. The smile faded. 'I suspect this place is going to be the new Bethlehem.' He looked down the valley, towards the glowing Tombs. 'I spent a lifetime teaching about St Teilhard's theories of evolution towards the Omega Point. Instead of that, we have this. Human folly in the skies, and a terrible Antichrist waiting to inherit the rest.'

A shadow fell over her book. She moved it away from the obstruction. The darkness returned.

"Hello," a voice declared in a tone that burned with arrogance to her ears. "You're Rei Ayanami, pilot of the prototype."

_She lives in her name, Superbia,_ Rei thought, ignoring the annoyance.

"I'm Asuka. Second Lieutenant Asuka Langley Soryu, pilot of Evangelion Unit 02."

Rei closed her book, keeping a finger in between the pages to maintain her place, and gazed up at the other girl, pupils the only point of darkness on her face. Behind Asuka, Hikary flinched back slightly, then straightened up again, forcing herself to meet that gaze.

"Let's be friends!"

"Friends?" Rei echoed. She really wished the other girl would go away and leave her in peace. "For what reason?"

"Why? Because it's convenient."

Rei opened her book again. "Convenience is a sufficient reason. However, other directives stand before the preservation of the friendship which now exists between us," she replied, turning that terrible gaze from Asuka, who seemed entirely unaffected by it."

Asuka paused, stance deflating. "You... do understand what friendship is, right?"

"A mutual bond entailing benefits and obligations for both parties," Rei stated in her monotone, all attention seemingly on the book. "It is a legacy of the social pack-pursuit origins of humanity."

The German's face took on the appearance that most people's did, when they had an extended conversation with Rei. "You're strange."

"Asuka!" gasped Hikary, in the background. "That's not right."

"And you're charming," said Rei softly.

Asuka turned to leave, as this wasn't getting anywhere.

"Oh, hah hah," she added over her shoulder.

"Thank you," Rei replied, in the same monotone.

~'/|\'~

Shinji was slumped in front of the television, flicking through channels. He knew that he _really_ should be doing his homework, as the combination of training and a PsychEval tomorrow would mean that he wouldn't have any time, but at the moment, he didn't really care. He just wanted to sit in a wonderful state of apathy.

Frowning, he picked up several beer cans left on the table, and transferred them to the recyclic. Honestly, there was no excuse not to just put the cans, made out of a hardened resin (which was much easier for a nanofactory to make from base materials, rather than tapping its metal reserves), in the recycler as soon as they were finished. He hoped that Asuka would be less avowedly indolent than Misato.

Not that that was difficult. There were pre-recylic landfill sites (now mostly salvaged and used as raw materials for the voracious nanofactories of the arcologies) with a better sense of cleanliness than Misato.

//Flick//

A studio audience was chanting a name.

"Sindry! Sindry! Sindry!"

Of course, they almost certainly weren't real. In this age of easy computer modelling, the production company had in all likelihood merely bought a standard "Low Brow" package, with each individual specimen given a randomised behaviour set to provide a suitably heterogeneous audience. All in all, though, they were probably less sophisticated than the AI opponents in a computer game.

A rather maternal looking Nazzadi, her black hair shot through with grey in a way that made her look almost grandmotherly, walked on stage, her clothes stylish while remaining understated, and smiled in the direction of the cameras, letting the applause from the audience wash over her.

She raised a hand. "Thank you, thank you," she said, in a voice that, despite her origins as a vat-born, showed no trace of the Nazzadi accent, instead elongating her sibilants in a way that had made her memorable among the perfect elocution that pervaded television . "Thank you. I'd like to say hello to all of you, and to all of the viewers watching from home. Welcome to the Sindry Show; I'm your host, Sindry." She cupped her hand, and turned to another camera. "That's me, in case you hadn't guessed," she said in a stage whisper, as an aside.

The audience laughed precisely on cue.

"Thank you, thank you," she said, blushing slightly. "And ladies and gentlemen, have we got a show for you."

"Have you?" called back the audience, all those who had an Enthusiasm quotient of over 0.43 joining in.

"Oh yes I have," she replied. "In the back room, we've got Bayl waiting with a girl born from an act of egocest."

There was a mixture of jeers, hisses and indrawn breath from the audience.

"Yes, I know," she replied. "Her mother, perfectly legally, went through the arcanotherapeutic sorcery which flips your gender, turning men into women and women into men. They call it 'Beckon the Unexpressed'," Sindry said, making the inverted commas with her fingers. "But what was not expected when it was developed by arcane researchers was that some people would use it to get themselves pregnant."

She turned to the other camera again. "You know, I don't think that those scientists and sorcerers were all that bright," she added, in another stage whisper. "I mean, haven't those eggheads ever been on the metanet? Once anything to do with human sexuality is invented, it's guaranteed that it will be used."

There was a mixture of boos and cheers from the audience.

"Before we can begin, we've got another one of Dr Eliphas' Explanations, for the weird and strange things that biology does. Over to you, Eliphas."

"Egocest can only be performed with the aid of the arcanotheraputic sorcery known variously as Beckon the Unexpressed, Aphrodite's Touch, or, more colloquially, Gender Bender," began a man's voice, speaking in refined, somewhat archaic Received Pronunciation over animated images. "After this rite is performed, over three days the subject's body painlessly shifts to what it would have been like had they been born as a member of the opposite sex. This is not a genetic shift; a man keeps his XY chromosomes when he becomes a woman, and a woman keeps her XX chromosomes when she becomes a man. However, apart from that fact in genetic testing, it is impossible to tell that it has occurred. This was originally developed as a method of gender reassignment far better than the crude surgeries of the twentieth century, allowing people to live out their lives happily as members of the gender they feel that they should have been born as. Of course, it did not take long before it saw wider use, by people who wanted to see how it was like for the other gender, and, inevitably once it had been found that it could make mixtures which did not occur in nature, in pornography.

The image focussed in on a strand of DNA, showing the classical double helix. "It was found that the individuals who underwent this process remained fully able to produce children if they had been fertile before hand. This immediately saw its uptake by same-sex couples who wished to conceive a child which was naturally theirs. This is where a few of the oddities with the procedure were found. You see, an individual born as a man has XY chromosomes, and these remain, even if their body becomes that of a woman. That means that one quarter of all pregnancies began by an individual born with male genetics miscarry immediately, as a foetus with the YY pairing of sex chromosomes cannot survive. Meanwhile, all babies conceived by individuals with a female genetic code are all female, as there is no genetic male to provide the Y chromosome. This has raised questions about whether men are now fully redundant," there was jeering from the male members of the audience, "as for the first time ever, an all female population could now perpetuate itself. However, such a unlikely prospect has been overshadowed by the tragic cases of egocestuous children which have emerged."

"Egocest can be performed by either gender, although it is easier for women, due to the issues of genetic men with their Y chromosomes bearing children. The individual obtains sperm while male, then switches, whether to or back to, female, and inseminates themselves. The infant conceived thus has their mother and father as the same individual."

The camera cut back to Sindry. "So, they're clones," she said. "Haven't scientists failed to make successfully cloned individuals, even before pressure from us made it illegal?" added the Nazzadi.

The camera cut back to Dr Eliphas. "No, they're not clones. That's what makes it so bad," he replied. "You see, normally, half your chromosomes come from one parent, and half from the other. That's 23 from each. But each egg, and each sperm doesn't carry the same 23; that's why brothers and sisters aren't identical. It's why there's even such a thing as brothers and sisters. And in the case of egocest, the children don't inherit the same mix as their parent had. Some genes which their parent had different copies of, so-called "heterogeneous" genes, they inherit two copies of the same one. And in many cases, that means that the child ends up with multiple recessive inherited diseases, even if their parent was only a carrier for them. The consequences for the children is the reason it is illegal, and classified as zeroth-degree incest."

"Thanks for explaining the facts, Dr Eliphas," replied Sindry, when the camera cut back to her. "He's such a bore, but we love him anyway," she added as an aside, to laughter from the audience. "Well, now that the good doctor has said his thing, let's bring out the guest!"

There were cheers from the audience which turned to gasps, as they saw that the somewhat brutish looking man, Bayl, was pushing a wheelchair. In it was a woman, looking to be in her early twenties, but from the way she shook, a constant tremor in her hands, and the slight twist in her facial features, it was clear that she was not well. The wheelchair was positioned opposite to Sindry, who sat down.

"And what's your name?" she asked.

"H-h-han-n-n-ah-h," the girl stuttered heavily, her voice thick as if she couldn't move her tongue properly. "I-i-i a-mm tw-tw-tw-e-n-n-n-ty w-w-on."

Shinji shuddered. These kinds of show were sick. They'd grab dysfunctional families and people from wherever they could find them, especially the poor from outside the arcologies; no, worse than that, because people actually volunteered to show this kind of thing on television. It was inevitable that they would bring out the egocestuous parent at some point too, subjecting that poor girl to even worse humiliation on television. Where they got those dysfunctional people, screwed up in all those novel and interesting ways, was a mystery to him. Was there some kind of agency that found them all and recruited them, for their own purposes?

_Nah. No-one would employ anyone who was as dysfunctional as the people on these shows._

He actually thought less of either Misato or Asuka for watching that show, given that it had been left on that channel.

//Flick//

"Save Humanity! Join the New Earth Government Arm..."

//Flick//

"and after all, it's better!" stated out a rather enthusiastic female voiceover.

The screen was filled with a horde of butterflies, a multicoloured chaotic mess of brightly coloured insects, flapping in random patterns which coalesced into a drink can.

"Gulmoth! A better drink for a better person!"

The drink cans split into their component butterflies, one last time filling the screen before the advert faded to black.

Shinji shuddered. The targeted advertising had picked up Misato's taste in goods, and so the unskippable adverts had homed in on her demographic with unerring accuracy, showing her exactly what she wanted to buy. It would take the LAIs a while to overcome the inertia of choices, and realise that there were more people resident in the house.

A solemn violin replaced the previous pop track.

"In 1999, humanity stood alone, unaware of the greater cosmos," a deep voiced man stated, over the sad music. "Bush the Younger had inherited the throne of the United States from his father. The violence of the Cold War had died down with the conquest of the Middle East by the United Nations. But secessionists who deny their authority are everywhere, and in the background, religious cults lurk."

A silhouette of a man stands before an open doorway, clad in a long black trenchcoat.

"And one man knows all about them."

The man pulls two machine guns from his belt.

"Parapsychic."

Two swords are unsheathed from the scabbards on his back, levitating free in the air. Around him.

"Spy."

The man's sunglasses glint in the dark.

"Saviour."

The man speaks, in a deep, gravelly voice, with a notable Nazzadi accent under his obviously affected South African accent.

"Let's see how your cult does against my Colt."

A guitar chord strikes.

"Piyumana is," states the voiceover.

"SNAKE!

FIST!"

The theme music strikes up.

The boy sighed. The Snake Fist series. He'd forgotten that a new one was coming out. Critically panned; really, really commercially successful. People were idiots.

//Flick//

"But have you found the murderer yet?" asked a pale faced man, notable streaks of white in his hair, despite his youth, as the camera focussed on his face. "We are paying you a lot, detective."

The Nazzadi woman, hair dyed purple, and dressed in a suit just a little tighter than might be expected, smiled faintly. "I'm afraid I can't do that, David," she replied.

"And why not," the man demanded, angrily. "We heard you were the best, T."

"And I am," she answered calmly. "The Tangency Detective Agency is the best around; we can find information from anyone on almost any subject, no matter how obscure."

"Then why can't you find the person who killed my wife!" he shouted at her, moving towards the woman.

T was completely unruffled by that; despite the immanent threat of violence, she merely adjusted her hair, and wondered over to look at the plants on the desk. "Bodies... they're such a peculiar thing, you know, David. Flesh, blood, skin; they're just a machine. You can take a human apart piece by piece and replace every single bit. You can even systematically replace the entire brain, through vivisection and systematically applied arcanotherapy, although they will lose all the memories in those removed parts. Nevertheless, autonomous functions remain, and the new brain tissue has the learning ability of a newborn. There are even people who cut out and regrow their own language centres, so that they can learn new languages at the same rate as an infant."

"What are you getting at!" snapped David.

"And yet," she continued unabashed, "kill someone, and there's almost no way to bring them back. Oh, sure, there are myths and tales, but the only way really known is sorcerous, and doesn't bring them back as much as lock an extra-dimensional entity into the shell, which believes, at least for a short while, it is them. Even when we could replace all the broken parts, making them as good as new, something vital leaves the body around the point of death."

The man gave a cry of frustration, turning his eyes to the ceiling. "Just... leave! You aren't helping find her killer, and I'm paying by the hou..." He was silenced, as an arm wrapped around his neck from behind, and he felt the pressure of a gun barrel against his ear.

"That wasn't your wife's body," hissed T into the same ear, as she held a UT-9 needle pistol up against the skin. From the shock on the man's face, he had no idea how she had moved so fast. "The skin was too soft, too fresh. I considered briefly that she was a New Flesher, with an obsession with regular skin graphs to keep her seeming young, but the inside of her mouth was wrong, too. That was a vat grown replica, unliving but genetically her, so that someone could fake her death. And you are an illegal sorcerer."

"Oh, come on," began the man, before T tightened the arm around his neck.

"The plant on your desk is not _Dactylorhiza sambucina_, as you would have people believe, but instead is _Dactylorhiza licinii_, a close relative under strict control by the OIS due to its use in summoning rituals. Now," she said, sweetly, grinding the pistol against his ear, "why don't you tell me where exactly your wife is?"

The audience can see a flicker of panic in David's eyes. "They'll kill me!" he stuttered, eyes wide.

"The OIS won't kill you if they have proof that you're human," T replied.

"Not the OIS!" he shouted, eyes dilated wide. "Never the OIS! I won't be me that long! It's already started! Kill me now!" He swallowed, a trickle of blood running from his tear ducts. "Look for the goddamnned Soul and Seal!" His body wracked in agony. "Oh, gods! Kill me! God's in her heaven..." he screamed, his voice degenerating into babbling, as the blood flow increased.

T squeezed the trigger. The needler didn't make a noise, the thin shard of metal accelerated silently to subsonic velocities straight into David's brain.

He slumped to the ground.

T squeezed the trigger a few more times, standing impassively over the body, making sure to destroy the brain and heart. Seven shots, in total.

"The Soul and Seal?"

The screen faded to the credits, with an anachronistic Tudor piece of music playing in the background.

Shinji made a noise of annoyance. He'd forgotten that the new series of _T for Tangency_ was on. He'd have to watch the episode properly some time later; he wasn't in the mood for kind of convoluted plotting in a T episode, not to mention the fact that Season 1 had shown how much they loved foreshadowing. This time he wasn't going to fall for it; he was going to keep a notebook and watch for any catchphrases or hints of theme arcs. Yes, _T for Tangency_, with its pronounced tendency to get diverted into things that the script writers felt were interesting at the time, was a hard show to watch when you didn't want to have to think. No one even knew what the entire running theme of cats was in the first series was about, although that wasn't to say that the metanet hadn't guessed. Some people had speculated on the connections to the old Bast myths of ancient Egypt, some that the fact that there had been cats at all of the important scenes of the Castellan arc meant that the cats were secretly controlling everything, and some just that the writers felt that cats (especially kittens) were cute, and liked putting them in surreal or humorous situations.

He checked the menu. The news on EBC wouldn't be on for a while.

_I wonder if Unit 02 will be in any pictures?_

//Flick//

"We hold life to be sacred, but we also know the foundation of life consists in a stream of codes not so different from the successive frames of a watchvid," said the Chinese man on the panel. "Why then cannot we cut one code short here, and start another there? Is life so fragile that it can withstand no tampering? Does the sacred brook no improvement?"

There was a round of polite applause from the audience; a real one, as these kind of topical debate programmes needed a sapient audience to pose their questions, even if anyone who wanted to attend had to be vetted.

The host inclined his head. "Well, I can see that Miriam is positively dying to respond to that answer. So, Miriam, what is your opinion on that question from the audience, about whether the genetics laws should be loosened to allow for prenatal repair of embryonic defects?"

The red-haired woman nodded her head vigorously. "Thank you, Pravin," she said, in an American accent. "I am fully opposed to such a violation of sacred human dignity, and I believe that all right-minded people would oppose such a potentially slippery slope. After all, if we begin to tamper with the human genetic code, where will we stop? The next generation may be similar, but the one after that? And after that? What monsters will be spawn from our genetic material; beasts akin to the horrific cannibals they call ghouls? Will we next create false gods to rule over us? How proud we have become, and how blind!"

"I object strongly to such a blatant slippery slope argument," interjected the Ashcroft scientist on the panel, as he adjusted his AR eyepiece. "Who really believes that just because we repair the faulty genes that would produce a congenital defect that would kill the child by the age of 30, that we would lose all sanity and become inhuman monsters. Rational discourse should be what decides these laws, not an appeal to the authority of a Bronze Age text written by people who would have been driven mad to see humanity in the Steel Age, let alone now. Man's unfailing capacity to believe what he prefers to be true rather than what the evidence shows to be likely and possible has always astounded me." The Russian sighed in a rather patronising way. "We long for a caring Universe which will save us from our childish mistakes, and in the face of mountains of evidence to the contrary we will pin all our hopes on the slimmest of doubts. God has not been proven not to exist, therefore he must exist."

There was loud, but unevenly distributed clapping from the audience. Several of the faces that the camera panned over looked offended, as did the red-haired woman on the panel.

The host cocked his head slightly. "Although this is a provocative topic, I'm afraid I'm going to have to end it here, so that we can cover the other questions before the end of the show." He flicked down on the desk. "The next question is from Warata, from the Loughton District of L2."

The camera focussed on a middle aged Nazzadi who stood near the front of the audience, his hair dyed a dark brown.

"Does the panel feel that use of a Migou bioweapon against Chicago-2, which was successfully contained, was due to the recent string of triumphs across the North American front, where our forces rolled back the Bugs all across a wide front? And does that mean that the Migou are feeling under pressure, if they resorted to the use of such a weapon?"

The host nodded. "Yes, that has been one of the major news stories in the last few days. Sweeping triumphs all across the Canadian province, combined with the Migou use of a large extra-dimensional entity as an attempted decapitation blow against the New Earth Government capital. I'd like to reassure everyone that the entity was stopped, although Lake Michigan remains sealed due to biological contamination." He paused. "Over to you first, Colonel Santiago."

"Well, firstly I'd like to congratulate our forces for the wide-scale triumphs against the fungi from Yuggoth," she began, and paused while mass applause erupted from the audience.

"Okay, quieten down, so that she can continue," said Pravin, after about a quarter of a minute.

"Thank you. That we could push the forces back was a sign that the increase of funding in the last few budgets is paying off, as the Engels enter into full use. In fact, I think we can put a large amount of credit for these victories down to those high-tech additions to the NEA, which have allowed us to push the biomechanical creations of the Migou back through superior firepower and armour. And yes, I do have to say that the use of biological weapons in this way was very alarming, but we've known for a long time that..."

Shinji snorted. That would probably have had Dr Akagi ranting and raving over the credit that the Engels were getting. That certainly seemed to be the official story they were putting out; there was no official connection between any of the Heralds; that first one had been "an advanced Dagonite mecha", while Mot had been some kind of unidentified spacecraft.

He yawned and stretched out. The bickering on Query Hour was relaxing in its own way, and he really couldn't be bothered to move right now.

And then the doorbell rang.

He groaned when he realised that Misato wasn't home yet, and so he would have to do it. A somewhat unlikely saviour showed her face, though, as Asuka went to do it. Over by the door, there was an exclamation of "Finally".

And then the boxes started flowing in. Shinji could only watch in horror as crate after crate began flowing through the door, an endless succession of delivery men gushing forth and spreading out like a liquid, maintaining their volume but filling all available floorspace with the boxes.

He managed to hold his tongue, as Asuka directed the stream of crates to wherever she felt they were more convenient, until _after_ the deliverers had left.

Shinji took a breath.

"What the hell are all these? What are you doing!" he said, in a somewhat panicked voice.

"That's not very nice," Asuka replied without looking at him, having already peeled open one of the boxes. "This is my stuff."

"All of this?"

"... yes."

"**All**of this?"

"Uh... yes."

"This stuff... it is all yours?"

"Look, if you're going to stand there, slack jawed like some imbecile, then you can help me unpack."

Shinji waved his hands in front of himself, still not quite fully comprehending the situation. "You had all of this stuff shipped over from Germany, so that it could sit around and obstruct my bedroom door."

"Well, that wasn't the end goal," Asuka replied, as she sorted through clothes, "but the fact that you'll have to unpack that one..."

"Those ones," interjected Shinji, acidly. "Plural."

"Whatever. The fact that you'll have to help me unpack those ones to get into your room so you can lock yourself away is, from my point of view, a benefit, yes?"

"But... but... but," Shinji spread his hands wide, voice filled with confusion. "Why would you even have this lot shipped over? Why didn't you just recyclic them, then fab some new ones?"

"It's not the same!" exclaimed Asuka, a hand pressed against her temple.

"Why not? A standard licence lets you have one physical copy at any one time, and if you recycliced the old ones, you'd only be paying for the energy costs."

"Because the things wouldn't be the same, obviously," replied the girl, speaking slowly, as if explaining to a child. "They'd just be copies. A copy of a thing is not the same thing, even if it started off the same at the molecular level."

"Yes, it really is. They'd be identical to the ones you had before, and more importantly you wouldn't be cluttering up the entire house with boxes."

"No, they're not," she replied, voice slightly raised. "Just because they began with the same initial state doesn't mean that a newly fabbed copy is the same thing. Things change and grow."

Shinji raised an eyebrow. "Your clothes change and grow."

A frown was sent back in his direction. "Don't be an idiot. It was a metaphor; I'm sure that even your minuscule brain can understand such things. But, yes, actually, the clothes are a lot more comfortable when they've been worn a few times. _And_ it means I have all my things accessible right away, instead of waiting for the fabber to make a new one."

Shinji threw up his hands in frustration, suppressing a nagging headache. "Whatever. I don't really care any more. Just get this stuff packed away somewhere. I'm not helping."

Asuka made an annoyed noise, turning away to unseal another package. "Just typical. You're not even needed here any more, you know," she added, after a slight pause. "You complain about practically being a conscript; well, now you can go. Back to wherever you came from."

"Toyko-3," muttered Shinji.

"Whatever. The point is, I'm a professional. I have to say that you've done a nice job filling in before I was moved here from the Eastern Front..."

"... just wait a moment," replied Shinji, jumping up, something inside snapping. "From what I saw of the reports Misato showed me, you've only actually been deployed twice in real life, and I was there for one of them. I actually have more physical experience than you.

"Irrelevant," she snapped back. "You have, what, less than six months training. I've been a candidate since I was four. Some natural talent at Evangelion synchronisation doesn't mean that you're suddenly actually able to fight. From what _I've_ seen of your combat, you rely on either just pulling a button... oh yes, incidentally, anyone could have used that cut up ship to fire that laser; I don't see why they needed a giant robot to pull the trigger..."

"... there wasn't a physical trigger, like there aren't for any of the Eva-scale weapons," Shinji retorted. "Direct link to the main Eva control..."

"It doesn't matter! I know that! Stop interrupting! The point is, the Kathirat was the only kill which was really yours, so really, we're even. Look; it would be better that way. You can go back to before, as you obviously don't want to pilot an Eva, and I don't have to put up with your constant unhelpfulness and annoying comments."

"I don't see how you can call me annoying," Shinji muttered. "Given how you're always angry, all the time, I don't think you can really tell the difference."

"I'm always angry?" she shouted back. "I have to put up with your constant passive-aggressive attitude. No wonder I've got a headache."

Whatever Shinji said in response was drowned out by alarmed squawking coming from the kitchen. He took a sudden breath, and got up, heading towards the source of the noise.

"Oh, right. Pen-Pen. Yes."

Asuka frowned. "Pen... Pen? Some pet?" she asked, in a less confrontational voice.

"... sort of," was the response. Shinji manoeuvred his was around the boxes that filled the kitchen, finally finding the bird trapped in a jail cell of crates. "He's... well, he's a penguin."

"A penguin," Asuka said, flatly.

"Yes."

"A penguin."

"Yes."

"You have a penguin living in the house."

"In the fridge, actually," said Shinji, massaging the back of his neck. Come to think of it, it sounded a lot more ridiculous than it really was. "In a custom compartment." He stooped down, and begin shifting the boxes that trapped the bird inside.

"Wark! Wark-wark! Wark!"

The girl took a deep breath. "Okay. I can accept that." She watched, fascinated as the penguin waddled over to the other fridge, and pulled out a can of beer. "How long did it take to train him to do that... wait a moment. He's using his hands like wings! I mean, his wings like hands! Penguins don't do that," she said, lowering her voice as the tiny, beady eyes of the pale bird gazed towards her.

"Wark!" Pen-Pen said, in a tone of voice which was decidedly warning.

"... He. Has. Teeth," muttered Asuka to Shinji, the previous animosity gone. "Birds. Do. Not. Have. Teeth."

"This. One. Does," he whispered back.

"Why. Does. This. Bird. Have. Teeth?"

"... okay, we can stop doing that," said Shinji, as the penguin continued to gaze at the two of them. "He can hear us, after all. Misato said that he has very good hearing."

"But he's a bird," Asuka almost sobbed. "Why is there a bird... a penguin living with Misato? Why can he open things? Why does he have teeth? How can he understand English? He's a penguin! Penguins are not sapient!"

There was a hiss, as Pen-Pen opened the can; a surprisingly sinister noise. "Wark," he said, coldly.

"This whole thing makes no sense," added Asuka, switching to Japanese. "Have you even asked Misato what she's doing with that freak of nature!"

The tiny beady eyes of the penguin narrowed further. "Wark," it said again.

"Yeah, he understand that too," said Shinji, wincing. "And he can do the crossword."

Asuka threw up her hands. "That's it. I give up. I'm not going to question the sheer irrationality of having a sapient penguin living with us. I'm not going to question what produced him. I am going to accept it, as long as it keeps its hands... its wings... its whatever off my stuff."

~'/|\'~

Dr Ritsuko Akagi was running through the details of what little of the Fifth Herald's corpse that had not been consumed by the Shoggoth. Masses of data filled her vision, a matrix of possibilities in Augmented Reality. Possibilities were shaped, plotted on three dimension colour coded graphs, and then discarded. If people from an earlier age had seen what she was doing, they would have called it more akin to magic, as obscure symbols (the scientific discoveries from arcane theory had left the Greek alphabet suffering from massive degeneracy, and thus science had pillaged alphabets from all over the world to get symbols to represent concepts which were undreamed of before) were moved around, changing colours used to plot data just as classical Cartesian co-ordinates were.

And it still didn't make any sense. Silently, she cursed the new drugs that she was on, even as she understood their purpose. Every time they switched mental stabilisers, or added a new one to the cocktail, her performance at the cutting edge of arcane theory took a hit, taking several months to climb back up. She knew why they were needed; they kept her sane (by the rather lax standards of arcane scientists), but it was a balancing act. Too many of some metal stabilisers would effectively lobotomise her, and an overdose would actually do so, requiring extended arcanotherapy to remedy the neurological damage. Too few, and she would break, her mind shattering into a million shards; each one brilliant, astonishing, useful, but fundamentally dangerous and broken.

She took a sip of coffee, and grimaced as she realised that she'd let it go cold, before a man's arms encircled her from behind.

"You've lost weight," said Kaji softly into her ear.

"Oh, really?" she asked, a hint of sarcasm creeping into her voice.

"You're wasting away," he continued, hugging her closer, "doomed to eternal unhappiness."

"And why would that be?" Ritsuko replied, in an arch tone, amused by the sheer patheticness of the approach. Honestly, she had much better reasons to waste away than self-centred unhappiness.

"Because a woman who has a mole in the path of her..." Kaji paused, in the process of stroking her cheek. "You had it removed, didn't you?"

"Yes," she replied, pulling his hands away. "Quite a while ago, in a routine physical. There was no reason to keep it."

"But that was, well, at least ten percent of your charm," said Kaji, in a decidedly melancholy tone of voice. "Is it some man, responsible for such a change? Or some woman, come to take my fair princess away to another castle? Tell me where I may find them, so that I may slay them and thus take your hand in marriage."

Ritsuko sniffed. "Do you smell ham?" She shook her head, smiling gently. She sort of missed the casual flirting of university; in retrospect, she hadn't made enough of the opportunity. On the other hand, she had left with a first-class degree, which had proven essential for her career plans, while Misato had only obtained the bare minimum to be accepted for her officer training, which said something. "Never mind. But I do believe, Mr Kaji, that you are trying to seduce me."

"And what if I am?" he answered with a blatantly seductive grin.

"Then the green-eyed, very, very scary lady over there, the one carrying the Enforcer, will shoot you," continued Ritsuko in the same tone of voice, gazing at Misato, who was pressed up against the glass glaring at the two of them, flared nostrils leaving twin patches of fog on the transparent wall. "And blood will get everywhere, because a fifteen millimetre hole in your cranium is not a viable path for sustained survival. And even you would have problems dodging that, if you didn't know that she was there." She gave an exaggerated sigh of annoyance. "And then I'd have to fill in even more paperwork, and the blood would get into some of the sensitive electronic here, and even worse I'd get blood in my coffee."

Kaji let go. "You do know that the coffee is cold, yes?" he pointed out.

"I found out just before you arrived." She made a small, non-committal noise, as Misato pried her face from the window, and actually came into the room. "Long time, no see, Kaji."

The blue-shirted man sighed. "Well, it's been a long time. For all of us."

"You're not as discreet as you used to be, now that you're single again," Ritsuko said with a smile in her voice. "Although you still appear to be quite discrete."

Misato frowned, and Kaji stared blankly at that comment.

"Discreet? Discrete?" She waved a hand. "It would have looked better written down. What I said what that, although he remains slightly separated from other people, behind that attitude, he is less subtle." She paused for a moment. "Actually, it might work the other way, too. He might have become more sympathetic and thus better at subtlety through understanding of others."

"I'm perfectly sympathetic," protested Kaji, smiling.

"No," Ritsuko replied. "You've always been very empathetic. That isn't the same thing at all."

"He's an idiot, I know that," interjected Misato. "Always has been, always will be." She stopped by Ritsuko's desk, glaring at the man. "Now why don't you go back home and sit at your desk analysing intelligence, like you told me you do. I'm not sure how you'd recognise it, of course..."

Kaji clutched a hand to his heart. "You wound me," he said, in a light-hearted tone. "But I was just notified of my transfer to London-2 this morning..."

"Wait a moment," Misato exclaimed. "What are you even doing here in the first place? What are you doing in an Ashcroft facility? Last time I saw you, you were getting off the C2 Transit System. You don't have a valid reason to be here in L2."

The man just broadly smiled with his habitual grin and shrugged. "It'll be fun. We can hang about together, like we used to."

Misato whirled to face him, face contorted and hands twisted into claws. "You? You! _Who in the hell_ would willingly spend time around..."

In what might be viewed as an act of cosmic censorship, before Misato's tirade against useless men who she would prefer to never see again, let alone spend time around, who spend all their time smirking and not enough time actually being useful, and n-plex other reasons, the sirens began to sound around the base, screaming out their warning with such frequency that those prone to infantile anthropomorphism would wonder why they were not losing their voices.

Glancing at the type code on the alarm displayed on the walls, Misato could only stare up at the ceiling and give an inarticulate yell of rage that ended in the words "Not again!".

~'/|\'~

"The defences around London-2 remain somewhat depleted from the casualties inflicted by the previous Heralds. The stationary defences were especially badly hit; we only have 26% functionality along the projected line of assault. Replacement parts for the Evangelions remain critically low. However, we now have all the Units available to us," stated the Major, a hint of triumph in her voice. "We will defeat the Herald before it comes into range of any high value targets, right as it emerges from the North Sea. Units 01 and 02 will engage the target simultaneously, while Unit 00 is positioned in reserve in case it pulls another surprise out from nowhere. This should be a close range battle; we've found that the easiest way to win is to neutralise the enemy's AT-Field as fast as possible. Moreover, this is the first proper night battle against the Heralds, as Mot was an ambush, so... be careful," Misato added.

Three titanic delta-shaped aeroplanes, super-heavy bombers who now carried a different (although some would say equally dangerous) cargo, cut their way through the dark sky, above the clouds, towards near where the ruins of NEG Norfolk, destroyed by Mot. The three Evangelions, dwarfed by these fliers, were slung underneath like toys.

Misato felt that they were actually looking like a proper military operation, as she gazed on the viewscreen back in London-2. For once, all the Evangelions were in the same colour scheme, the blueish grey-white of urban camouflage _and_ were all using the Type-C armour. The only way to tell them apart was by their heads, where the legacy genetics of the underlying organism had produced a different number of eyes.

She hoped that this would go well.

"Are you sure that we should have deployed all three Units at once?" Ritsuko asked her, paralleling her own doubts. Yet, paradoxically, this had the net effect of calcifying her own certainty that this was the right thing to do.

"Yes," she nodded. " We have access to all three Evangelions; we should be trying to guarantee that the Herald is killed with the minimum risk to any of them individually." The Major paused. "And we're getting far less Army or Navy support for this mission," she added in a darker tone of voice. "The previous targets have been eliminated with considerably more support. Against a Herald, I'd prefer overkill than defeat."

Her friend nodded. "Good. You should be able to justify this to the Representative when he gets back." She paused. "Assuming things don't go really wrong, that is."

Misato shuddered. "Don't say things like that. You'll jinx the operation." She licked her lips nervously. "And I did get authorisation from Deputy Representative."

"Just so you remember," Ritsuko warned.

Meanwhile, back in the Evangelion entry plugs, Asuka was feeling a little bit annoyed.

"This is my combat début in L2," she complained, "and I'm not allowed to fight alone? This sucks," she added, in a sullen voice. "What possible reason could there be to bring those two along, in their obsolete Units?"

That comment was inevitably going to draw a response, and on cue a window appeared in the front of the entry plug.

Surprisingly enough, it was Rei. "Your statement is incorrect," she informed the other girl, her cold eyes, only a frosting of pale grey around the pupil serving as an iris, somehow gazing through the redhead. "After the recent refit, all three Units are using Type-C armour. The tactical difference between the Evangelions in a technical capacity is negligible."

"Did I ask your opinion?" snapped Asuka back.

"Your statement was factually incorrect. It needed to be remedied," was the response.

Shinji's head appeared on the wall too. He was actually rather surprised. That was the most words he had ever heard from Rei in one go, and more than he had heard from her on most days.

He vaguely wondered what kind of image adjustment they had to do to the picture to remove the LCL tint.

"Look, we're just going to follow the plan," he said, trying to defuse any tensions. And possible diffuse them, too. He wasn't quite sure what quite was the difference between the two words.

_Stupid English and its homonyms... is that the right word? Stupid language and all the words that sound alike_, he thought.

Shinji shook his head, bring his attention back to entry plug. It was funny how the mind wandered. He found Asuka staring at him, and realised she'd been talking while he was not paying attention.

"So you don't agree, Third Child?" she said, leaning forwards towards the camera, voice hostile.

"_Shinji_!" he corrected.

"Answer the question!"

"Ego is irrelevant," interjected Rei.

Asuka spluttered, an odd noise with the harmonics shifted by the LCL filling her lungs. "What? It is not ego! It's just that I should be the one to..."

"Ego is detrimental to the cause," the white girl replied in a tone which would have been described as icy had anyone but her used it. "The salvation of the world requires that the ego is subsumed to the greater good of humanity."

"What? What are you talking about?" Asuka was getting increasingly annoyed by the girl. The First Child always seemed to be like this; annoyingly cryptic, a discrete voice which spoke alone. She could see that Shinji was just as perplexed, although... was that a hint of fear in his eyes as he listened to her words. No, not quite fear, but something akin to it. Apprehension, perhaps.

She would have to find out more about those two.

"The Heralds are beings of pure ego. Their inability to co-operate is what has doomed them," the pale girl continued.

The command team was getting worried, too.

"How's the First Child's synchronisation ratio?" asked Ritsuko.

"Holding steady at sixty-one, plus-or-minus three percent," reported Maya calmly.

The blond woman started biting at a thumbnail, before realising that she was doing that, and tucking both hands into the pockets of her lab coat. She was the only one here who really knew the potential danger of the First Child, but she was so orthogonal to normal ways of thought (which would logically mean that she would actually be tangential, the scientist thought) that it was very hard to distinguish between her normal behaviour and possible mental contamination.

"Immediately force an ejection if we get a repeat of the Start-Up Incident," she ordered the technical staff, turning to the Director of Operations. "Misato, I recommend that we keep the First Child in reserve."

The black-haired woman turned her head and looked at Dr Akagi in a peculiar manner. "I'm already doing that," she said. "I do know her synchronisation ratio is notably worse than the other two's, and she has had the worst loss of control," a patronising hint leaking into her voice. "Now, if you'll excuse me, they should be deploying soon."

Ritsuko sighed inside. _Thank goodness she thought I was merely worried about the low synchronisation ratio and the inferior control..._

She made a note on her PCPU, though;

HERALDS: BEINGS OF PURE EGO? UNABLE TO CO-OPERATE?

~'/|\'~

Unit 00 was detached first, the blue-grey cyclops falling through the dark sky. Inside the fluid-filled entry plug, the First Child was calm. It was not as if this utter weightlessness, immersed in the almost-blood taste of the LCL, was an unfamiliar sensation to her.

_She's been in there for ten years. Floating in darkness._

The A-Pod harness kicked in, reactionless thrusters producing an action which lacked an equal and opposite reaction, or so it was believed. That was not true. It was merely that, when the fabric of space-time was being used in such a manner, the opposing force could be spread out across the entire system.

She landed as gently as could be hoped by the standards of a forty metre biped, feet leaving massive dents in the hardened road as she sunk to one knee. There was a moment of stillness, as Rei held that position, motionless.

Then the single red eye of Unit 00 turned, its gaze scanning the landscape. In the darkness, it cast the land in a bloody red light. Once, the skies above them would have been polluted by light. Now, however, with the retreat of the populace into arcologies, the night was returned to a more primal state, stars fully visible through the holes in the cloud layer.

She found what she was looking for, the weapons drop, and loped over to it, leaving scars in the landscape where she stepped. Cradling the Charge Beam she had been assigned, she then returned to a waiting position, both body and Evangelion motionless, waiting for further orders.

The other two Children were dropped close to the coast, on the decaying ruins of what had once been a commuter village.

"Oh," Asuka said with a sudden glint of happiness in her eyes, as she examined the weapons crate marked "02".

"I thought you'd like the Deef Spear," commented Misato, a similar hint in her voice.

"I know I'd trained with them, but I thought they were stuck on the drawing board. Too many issues with the superconducting fibres and keeping the staff strong enough to be used by an Evangelion," the girl replied, as she reverently lifted the polearm, a good ten metres longer than the Unit was tall, from its case.

"There were," interjected Dr Akagi. "There were beyond modern materials technology, and required far too much fine control over the AT-Field to be truly useful in a combat situation."

Asuka paused as she swung the spear around, getting a grip on the balance. "What changed?"

Ritsuko grinned, a smile with a disproportionate amount of malice. "The Heralds changed."

Dimensionally Fielded weapons, she explained, were an innovation of the Evangelion Project. They were commonly in use; the integrated bladed weapons on the Units were all subject to a D-Field. The sorcerous ritual that produced the D-Field had been known about by occultists (and cultists) since before the discovery of Arcane Theory, but before had only been used as personal protection. The D-Field functioned as a catalyst, to promote the formation of an AT-Field around the weapon, and locally boost the strength, giving a concrete advantage against other AT-Fields. But there were problems with scaling; the two warped spaces were similar (but fortunately not the same, because if two D-Fields overlapped, anything in the intersection was torn apart at a sub-atomic level), and reacted in funny ways. Even the massive computing powers of full immersion Magi dives had not been able to find anything more than an empirical formula for how they interacted.

"And so we found that the remains of Mot, the fractal black crystalline structure, had an exceptionally high Arcane Field permissibility," explained Dr Akagi. "A solid core of that runs down the centre of the D-Field Spear, meaning that for the purposes of AT-Field generation, the spear is part of the Evangelion."

Most of the explanation had been meaningless to Shinji, as he hefted the weapon provided out of his own equipment crate. A small autonomous series of cables snaked out of his wrists as he (no, he reminded himself, as Unit 01) picked up the multi-barrelled contraption.

_Ah, yes. The one that they insist that I not call the plasma minigun, but I can't remember the real name for._

As the targeting reticle appeared in screen, the name "Multi-Barrelled Automatic Magnetically Confined Ionised Gas Accelerator Prototype" appeared. It was another product of the fact that Evangelions stood at an uncomfortable level in the NEG armoury. They were three times the height of the next tallest bipeds, the Seraph and Chamshal Engels, but were too small for the naval-sized D-Engines which could enable them to chuck out capital grade firepower. The MBAMCIGAP was a workaround for that problem.

The design process had obviously passed through certain mental steps. It had started with complaints about not being able to use capital grade weapons, then moved onto asking for suggestions for how they might be able to compensate for that. The thought train got vaguer at that point, but at some point someone had obviously pointed out that often weight of fire could compensate. And then the phrase "What if we strapped eight plasma cannons, each with an independent smaller D-Engine, together, and made them spin to promote cooling?" had been uttered. Some back of the envelope calculations had been thrown together on someone's PCPU, and it had been found that, despite the blood alcohol level of the person who had come up with the idea, it actually had the potential to work.

Misato's face appeared before him. "Is everything operation, Shinji?"

"Yes, it looks fine from here."

The woman smiled. "I told them that the plasma minigun would be a good idea, but they didn't believe me until they actually did the calculations."

Ritsuko sighed. "One of your drunken ideas was good. The rest were bad. As I recall, you wanted to attach rocket boosters to the Deef Spear." There was chuckling from around the command room, releasing the tension.

"Shush," ordered the Major. "Pilots; contact with the Herald is ETA six minutes."

They sat in silence.

Far off, something broke the surface of the water. It would not have been visible in the darkness with the human eye (though it would with the Nazzadi eye), but the visual enhancements built into the Evangelions (as with all modern military gear) detected the water pouring off the titan that strode in from the sea, a figure of solidity in the protean waters.

"Right, this is it!" announced Asuka, with a predatory grin on her face. "I'll take it down, while you cover me."

"You could wait for me to weaken the AT-Fields first," countered Shinji. "At least wait to see if it can't shoot back before charging in!"

"Both of you, hold back," ordered the Major. "We've got an airstrike incoming."

Misato hated having to keep that from them, but orders from her superiors in the New Earth Government Army had necessitated it. After the attack on Chicago-2 just as Unit 02 was there, suspicion existed that it was the Evangelions which drew the Heralds. Certainly, the fact that so far the Heralds had conveniently only attacked places where there were Evangelions was screaming on the "Not-A-Coincidence" alarms of counter-intelligence units. Either the Evangelions attracted the Heralds, or there was someone who was arranging it so that the Units would be there. If so, that would be indicative of some greater conspiracy, that someone in the NEG had the ability to predict when the Heralds would attack. Such information would be very useful, as it would allow proper deployment of troops, rather than this slow seep of forces away from the front lines to protect the most important arcologies from such a potential threat.

And thus the higher-ups (the orders had come from the European Field Marshals themselves) had ordered her to see if the Evangelions could be used as bait, to place them slightly off the direct path of the Heralds, to see if the monster would adjust its course to make sure that it engaged them.

And it had. The behemoth now striding from the waters had notably turned, to engage the three Children in the three Evangelions.

That was not a good sign. Both in the short term, in that they were about to be attacked by a Herald, and in the long run this called the survival of the Evangelion Project into doubt.

It was then that the first wave of bombs hit, as the skies echoed to the crack of supersonic aircraft. Vast amounts of water were thrown up by the blasts, as well as the rippling explosions which broke against the coruscating mesh of the AT-Field. The behemoth did not fall, though, but instead broke into a run towards land, running through the fire and mist, AT-Field shaped like an arrow before it, parting the waters and running clear on the seabed.

A light on the display flipped. "You are cleared to engage," ordered the Major to the two pilots.

"Cover me!" called out Asuka, as she sprinted towards the fast-encroaching Herald, deef spear held in both hands as a lance.

"You're getting in my way!" shouted Shinji into the comms, as he was forced to cut off the plasma minigun, the stream of eight new suns no longer burning away the night and casting weird shadows on the ceiling above. Making a noise of frustration, he checked the lock of the MPACK 4s on his shoulders, one of the new things that the Type-C armour gave, then triggered with a thought a salvo of 8 rockets. The tiny computer brains within them recognised the presence of a friendly unit before them, and took evasive action, cutting upwards into the air before curving down onto the target, the explosions (which would have wrecked a Locust) doing nothing but producing more of a lightshow.

_I hate AT-Fields!_ Shinji thought in a matter most intense.

The red-haired girl in the blue-grey Unit 02 saw the rippling explosions before her, as missiles cut over her head, and twisted her gait slightly, to allow her to mimic Shinji's actions, a second salvo of missiles flying flat and straight at the oncoming, round-shouldered target.

"Cover me!" she screamed over the comms.

"You're in my way!" Shinji shouted back, staring at the scene before him, as he triggered a second set of missiles.

Asuka lived for moments like this, she really did. Adrenaline flooded her system, overcoming the limiters in the LCL-f, designed to keep the fine muscle control and the clear head needed for optimal Evangelion operation. Each foot was placed perfectly, time slowing to a crawl to permit her to leap from area of solid ground to solid ground. She was the blademaster, and the Unit was her blade. A perfect harmony of war.

She reached the coast even as the Herald closed in closer, pushing hard against the ground and leaping up. Reaching out, she extended the cosmic, enveloping AT-Field out, down along this marvellous new spear and

_Are you sure it will work, she had asked._

Oh, don't worry, the doctor had replied. By doing it this way, the usual risks are completely negated. As long as you are willing to put up with the ... wastage from the inferior specimens.

If I cared about inferior specimens, I wouldn't be here, she snapped back. Who do you think I am, some sort of superstitionist?

The doctor had smiled. Good to know that, he had said.

thrust it straight down, into the heart of the Herald, the blade going straight through the body. With a flourish, she pulled the weapon free, tearing upwards through the beasts flesh. With the AT-Field wrapped around and through it, the spear was more akin to a guardless long blade than a mere spear.

The round shouldered beast, covered in oddly compelling geometrical patterns that seemed to twist and turn from out of the corner of your eye, fell apart, split from mid-section to right shoulder.

Shinji gazed, eyes wide at the scene before him. That was shockingly fast and easy.

"... good job," he finally managed to stutter out.

Asuka cocked her head, eyes aflame and the demonic grin of a central nervous system flooded with adrenaline plastered across her face. "Now, how about _that_, Ikari," she declared proudly, voice filled with pride. "Battle should always be elegant and without waste. I just guess my design is better than yours, then."

Rei's head appeared. "The target has not been eliminated," she stated.

Asuka's eyes wided, and she blinked twice. "What?" she asked, screwing up her face.

"What?" queried Shinji, eyes widening ever further.

"What!" shouted Misato back in the control room.

The torn apart Herald, body oozing ichor into the water, began to twitch, the water around it sublimating straight from liquid to plasma as the coruscating AT-Field tore electrons from their orbits. In a beautiful mutilation of topography, the mass turned inside out into two duplicates of itself, the black and white patterns shifted into the red for one and the blue for others.

Twitching, these newborn (or were they really?) beings pulled themselves to their feet by flowing so that they were standing up.

Or at least tried to. The four eyes of Unit 02 burned white as Asuka whipped the spear around, shattering the hastily erected AT-Field and lopping the left arm off the red one. The spear continued through, before bouncing off a second AT-Field, the two areas of distorted spacetime irradiating the area as high energy protons and neutrons flew off in all directions, in a blast as the fundamental forces briefly, and just along the Planck length edge of the Evangelion's AT-Field, reunited into a GUT superforce.

As they collapsed back into the separate forces, the area of space where it had happened underwent rapid expansion, as in the first few moments of the universe. In the impossibly high energy densities, brief life evolved and died out as the universe suddenly became cold and dead to them, the magnetic monopoles and exotic particles that made up their body dissipating. They lived and died in subjective eternities, a brief blossoming of life unheard of since the early stages of the universe, and indeed never to be heard of by any of the unknowing gods, vast beings that survived in this cold dead cosmos where the least actions took untold aeons, and who never knew of the brief ecosystem that they had created.

No, more of a worry to the horrific beings which had birthed that stillborn cycle of life was the expansion of space-time they had unknowingly caused. Some of the participants, snug within their own realities which they called an AT-Field, could weather this sudden flux in universal constants, as reality tore itself apart, the distance between proton and neutron suddenly much greater than what the strong force could support.

A sphere of matter roughly one and a half kilometres in radius ceased to exist. Under most circumstances, this would have released vast amounts of energy, but the energy densities had crushed some matter to under its Schwartzchild radius. And a number of nascent, short-lived black holes were exactly what the abused fabric of spacetime did not need.

To explain what had just happened with the classic metaphor of heavy weights and a rubber sheet, the presence of the blackholes were akin to a heavy weight on the sheet, stretching it down and attracting things to them. Meanwhile, the spacetime expansion was the rubber sheet being stretched, each point getting further away from each other, while keeping the same amount of material between them.

To expand the metaphor, the AT-Fields had an effect on space and time roughly similar to taking a knife to the rubber sheet and slashing at it in a methodical pattern of cross hatching, leaving only enough material for it to just hold together, allowing it to be shaped to the will of the user. With all the opposing stresses, was it really a wonder that a rubber sheet, weakened by the knife, would fall apart?

Now, convert the rubber sheet into the five known dimensions and _n_ higher dimensions, where _n_ is not even necessarily a natural number, and the effects of what had just happened could be appreciated.

To cut things short, spacetime gave way under the strain.

And all these events had taken a period of time to which the firing of a single neuron would look like an aeon.

~'/|\'~

Misato stared up at the viewscreen, hoping for anything. Contact with all three of the Evangelions had been lost, along with a large number of NEG aircraft in the same airspace.

"Oh Gods, oh God, oh God," someone was muttering. Misato wanted to join in.

_But I won't pray any more. Not after the Fall of New Kuala Lumpur. Not after the First Strike._

"Massive thermal bloom!" called out Liutenent Aoba. "The Reality Engines," he used, in the stress of the moment, the technicians term for the scanners which detected ripples in the fabric of reality, "they're screaming. Something happened there, and it's completely unheard of."

"Not again," said Ritsuko weakly, as she clutched at her forehead.

"No, no it's not!" yelled Aoba, as more data flowed in, breaking through his usually laconic outer shell. He swallowed hard, and licked his lips nervously. " We.... I found a... a match. It... it matches the Zone."

A silence fell over the room; a dreadful, terribly loud silence that drowned out the panic that hummed in the air. The noiselessness held; quiescent and horrible, for what had been said could not be unsaid.

The Zone had consumed the city of Las Vegas right at the start of the Second Arcanotech War, amid dark whisperings of illicit research into teleportation technology. A swirling void of darkness, reality given way to the random shifting of an infinite number of dimensions, one hundred and thirty kilometres in radius. _Things_ came from the darkness, vile protean shapes which had to be contained, and slowly and surely the Zone was growing, consuming the lands of mankind. Even those who were not sucked into that Well of Oblivion were affected, because the Zone produced the rogue parapsychics known as Zoners, normal individuals driven mad by the powers which they had thrust upon themselves. Normal parapsychics were theorised to be a natural progression of humanity; they possessed innate powers which were determined by their genetics.

Zoners were not natural. They were insane by human standards, even the most stable of them, and many could crush an APC full of soldiers into a ball.

And they had quite possibly created a new one.

The Major was the first to break the silence.

"Shinji! Rei! Asuka! Report!"

The pale face of the First Child appeared on screen. She appeared completely unruffled by the hideous tear in reality, her face as emotionless and impassive as ever.

"I am alive," she informed the Major. "I was outside the rift."

"Any sign of Shinji or Asuka?" the woman asked, frantically.

"There is no sign of them as of yet," Rei replied, as if she was merely reporting that they were late for a meeting. "However, as long as they retain the ability to generate an AT-Field, they will survive. If they do not, they will be killed instantly. And painlessly," she added, a hint of unrecognisable emotion flashing across her face.

Misato turned to Ritsuko. "What do you know about that thing? How do we get them out of it?"

"... I really don't know," replied the blond woman, hands clutched at her temples. She groped around inside the pockets of her labcoat, pulling out a small cylinder, which was screwed into an injector. She relaxed as the device clicked, removing her other hand from her forehead. "Okay." She took a deep breath.

"Do not worry," Rei continued. "Aleph-one-dimensional local space is not stable in conjunction with forced 5-plus-n-dimensional space. Only three contingencies are stable."

"But... how do you know this?"

Rei managed to, while keeping her expression completely motionless, convey a similar feeling to what you get when you ask an adult _why_ basic addition works like it does.

"And what can we do?" she continued, somewhat breathless at the ... well, the only really applicable term was _alien_ intelligence before her.

"There is no need for concern, as nothing that can be done to change the inevitable results," the First Child replied, in a way that Misato guessed was meant to be reassuring.

"The Zone... it's shrinking," reported Makota.

"Five-plus-n-dimensional space is calcifying around the AT-Fields," clarified Rei.

"That doesn't clarify anything," blurted out Misato. "Ritsuko, what is she talking about?"

"Uh..." the blond woman paused, "Yes, that makes sense. I think. Basically, although we'd need to run it through the Magi, I think it's a distinct possibility that the stable AT-Fields are closing it. That is to say, what the First Child has said is one of the possibilities of an Arcane Field interacting with a shattered dimensional space. On the other hand, there are more than 9 times 10 to the power of 3 configurations predicted, and the theory hasn't been worked out properly yet. How she would know what would happen in such a complex A-Theory problem is... a puzzle."

Rei continued to stare from up on the screen, white hair floating around her in the LCL.

"Go do whatever you can to help," ordered the Major.

The girl nodded. "Understood." The window on the viewscreen blinked off.

A subtle tension left the control room, for everyone apart from Fuyutsuki.

_She should not be able to do that yet._

~'/|\'~

The decay in the radius of this nascent Zone proved to be exponential, the perfect sphere of shredded space vanishing into nothingness as the mundane "reality" reasserted itself. As it shrunk, water flooded down into the crater, pooling under the new pit in the surface of the earth, the continental crust scarred by the new wound carved into it.

Unit 01 was the first to emerge back into the mundane, appearing at what had been the land level.

Shinji screamed, a noise more of surprise and shock than horror, as suddenly Unit 01 fell a hundred metres, landing heavily on one arm. There was a second scream, but that was from the sympathetic pain from the damage to the arm of the Evangelion. His eyes darted around the entry plug, trying to work out what had just happened.

_The last thing... what the hell? Rei had just said that it wasn't dead... and then... something happened. _

He looked around, pulling himself up with his (no, he reminded himself once again, the Evangelion's) good arm. He was at the edge of a vast, hemispherical crater, geometrically perfect. Gales were blowing into it, sucked towards the centre. But such an anomaly was nothing compared to the swirling blackness at the centre, opaque wisps of blackness (and colours within the blackness, colours only describable with phrases like "a sort of yellowish greenish purple").

He screamed and clapped his hands over his eyes. The Evangelion mimicked him, but it did no good, as the external cameras across the Unit still gave images to the interior of the plug walls, the blackness and the strange light shining through the hands before his eyes.

"Cut his viewscreens!" ordered the Deputy Representative, back in London-2. The order was rapidly implemented, and Shinji relaxed as the walls went back to their normal, solid appearance.

The proto-Zone continued to close, right to the epicentre, where it sealed itself with a rippling bulge that seemed to produce a shockwave in the universe itself. Two figures exploded away from one another, momentum conserved from the impact arcing down, to the waters now rushing into the bottom of the crater over a kilometre below. Asuka overcame her confusion to what had exactly happened, and tucked her AT-Field tight around herself, bringing her uncontrolled spin into a tight ball, spreading her limbs eagle wide.

And the Herald screamed, a cry of infinite agony and infinite loss.

_**It[--]gone  
Half [--] soul [----] half [--] mind [--------] by [---] Daemon [------] himself [-] cannot [----] like [----] and [--] I [----] die [---] live [--] this [------] death [-] hate **_

It was half-dead already. The blow from that cursed weapon, hewn from the corpus of the Herald of Nyarlothtep, who had dedicated the totality of its existence to the promotion of entropy in emulation of that which it had worshipped, had torn apart reality, opening it up to the Ultimate Reality.

And half of it had not been warded by the Guard of Yog-Sothoth.

Now it was half-lobotomised, half its soul and half its flesh consumed by something far greater than itself. Life like this was impossible. Even before its ascension, it had always been twinned. And now it was alone, truly alone. It had always had another mind, to the extent that they had been two, and now it could do nothing but stare at the horrors of a cold cosmos where one was isolated, cut off from the minds of others.

_**I [--] not [----] if [-] die [-] am [-------] dead.  
Kill [--]**_

It saw another loping figure approach the edge of the crater, now flooding with water. A single red eye stared at it, and it suddenly knew how it could make things right.

A half-life was no life at all. Cessation was better than this existence.

_**Kill [--] now!**_

[---] did [---] do [----] to [--] I [--------] your [----] call!

The Herald thrust its AT-Field down into the waters, sending it flying up into the air, towards the figure of Unit 00, which stood in the darkness, the clouds above the crater shredded by the release of the cosmic energies, letting the stars of the Strange Aeon shine in.

Rei aimed the charge beam she was carrying. The target was moving in a conventional parabolic trajectory, not even attempting to adjust its flight path.

She fired.

No AT-Field manifested to prevent the beam of relativistic particles punching through the centre of mass, tearing through the red, eye-like core.

Briefly, the landscape was lit up by another explosion, the waterfalls into the 1.5 kilometre crater cast in a harsh light.

"Target eliminated," reported Rei.

"Make a note," snapped the Major. "We are going to have to work on their training. We don't want to 'win' like this again."

And even as she sighed in relief, inside, Misato's mind was whirring.

_If this incident involving two AT-Fields caused a Zone, what does that mean about what happened in Las Vegas?_

~'/|\'~

_Outside Space He waits. Outside Time He waits. He is neither Space nor Time, because an Other is those. No, He is the hanging frame upon which Space is suspended. He is the One who provides the Sands for the Hourglass of Time. The Flutes must play and the Bells must ring, and the Mysteries of the Earth must be Mapped out so that we may go where we wish, rather than descend into that Primal Chaos. All Things come from Him; all Things will return to Him. And if He wakes, that Day shall Come._

And Time and Space Shall be Warped, and all that is Felt shall be Looped. He will Play, when the Music stops and He wakes, and Mankind will not survive that. The Days of Sun shall end when the Gift of Yog-Sothoth, the Mantle of the Gate and the Key, does connect with Growth and matter and the rays of the Sun shall become One and the Same. That shall be a sign of the End Times.

I Feel for the Generation who sees the two Holes into the Body of the Daemon-Sultan. It shall be a Sign that They are all not Long to Live. Man Shall be wiped from the Earth, in a Wave of Darkness, and all the Constructs which We build for Ourselves shall prove to be no more permanent than a Hand of Sand in a wind.

The End is Nigh!

~ The _Necronomicon_, attributed to the infamous Arab author, Abdul Alhazred


	13. Interlude 2: Fool's God

**Interlude 2**

Fool's God

~'/|\'~

The air was thick with pungent incense, the tailored hallucinogenic compounds loosening the minds of the robed figures from the constraints of their bodies and what might be laughably called mundane reality. The light was dim, yet all pervasive, a dull yellow that surrounded the figures and enveloped them, the walls themselves glowing. In this, the gold robed figures were almost invisible, only observable by the shimmers and reflections that they gave off as they swayed. The only truly distinguishable feature in the room was the pool of black fluid in the middle, which writhed and bubbled, fine tendrils protruding from the formless surface and tracking the individual figures even in the odd light.

The music came to a stop, and all the figures froze. All bar one, who stepped forwards, pulling off their golden veil and hood, to reveal a crimson shroud underneath, still leaving their figures anonymous.

"Friends!" the figure announced, in an androgynous voice, "It is good to see you all here today. Our numbers remain unchanged. It is a good sign, for it tells us that the Elder Gods protect us from the evil of the agent of the terrors which ruled the world long ago. Blesséd be Their names!"

"Blesséd be!" the figure echoed, the voices resonating strangely in the curved walls of the chamber.

"We must abhor the evil of the group which publicly calls itself the New Earth Government, but we know to be nothing more than the puppet of the Hand of the Crawling Chaos himself. The Elder Gods have revealed this to us, blesséd be Their names."

"Blesséd be!"

"The Hand of the Crawling Chaos would burn the world to ash, and rend down the bodies of the people of the world to be consumed by their vile master. They may try to hide, but there are signs of their malignancy hidden in every deed. Even their name reveals the vile purpose they intend for the world. They are reviled and forsaken!"

"Reviled and forsaken!" the others echoed.

"Down with the Servants of the Crawling Chaos!" one of the other figures in the crowd shouted, in the same anonymous, androgynous voice.

"Down with the Traitors to Humanity!" yelled another.

"Death to the Blasphemers of the Flesh!" added a third.

"Death to the Ashcroft Foundation!" shouted the group as a whole, each voice perfectly synchronised. "Destroy the technology they use to control the New Earth government! Let Freedom Reign!"

The red veiled figure, the only one distinguishable, raised both hands. "Friends. Our righteous anger at the corruption which permeates the very basis of the world is justified. The Elder Gods know this, blesséd be Their names."

"Blesséd be!"

"But," the figure raised a finger, "but, their reach is long and terrible. They control everything. The scanners in every arcology door, the cameras that watch every move. Only in this one sacred place, guarded from their tainted eyes, can we be safe, and plan how we can overthrow their blasphemous tyranny. For a tyranny it is. The Hand of the Crawling Chaos controls everything about this war. They invited the Migou to invade, only to turn on them, so that they could steal their technology. How many of you have lost friends and family from the activity of those loathsome insects, or found that your entire race was created as a lie to be used as a weapon? For that, the Hand of the Crawling Chaos are reviled and forsaken."

"Reviled and forsaken!" the group repeated.

"The Hand of the Crawling Chaos puppets the monsters of the Rapine Storm, using them as the monster at the gates so that people are confined to the arcologies. Those poor fools who have joined those monsters are used as experimental subjects by the Ashcroft Foundation, testing out new drugs and genetic engineering, to produce supersoldiers. They care nothing for ethics or morality; it is said by some that the Hand of the Crawling Chaos even have produced child soldiers who they use in their cult-army right now! For that, and ten thousand other crimes, they are reviled and forsaken!"

"Reviled and forsaken!" the echo came back.

"And for the greatest of the crimes, the Ashcroft Foundation is the force behind the Esoteric Order of Dagon! It was they who bought back an ancient cult as a tool, for they believe that they follow the Crawling Chaos and so they do not fear the High Priest of the Outer Gods. Fools! For that, they are reviled and forsaken!"

"Reviled and forsaken!" the others answered, thus finishing the recital of the Three Crimes.

"But we," continued the figure, "we are the loyalists to the cause of humanity. We will save it, because the Elder Gods, blesséd be Their name..."

"Blesséd be!"

"... have told us that we must. We have seen the darkness that will come if we do not follow them, and we shall prevent it, by any means necessary." The figure paused. "But though the Elder Gods are our best hope, there is but one who is the best hope for us all. Though the corruption of the Hand of the Crawling Chaos holds the world by its throat, even as they use the Dagonites as a tool, we have our own, greatest ally. The elements themselves back us, under the command of their lord. _Ia, ia. Ia Kthanid!_"

"_Ia! Ia! Ia Kthanid!_" the cultists shrieked.

"_Ia Kthanid!_ Brother of the High Priest of the Outer Gods, the dread beast known only as Cthulhu, our Lord Kthanid stands against the depredations of his brother!"

"_Ia Kthanid!_"

"_Ia Kthanid!_ He is as good as his brother is evil. He is our last, best hope. And so we, his favoured ones, must obtain all the information about the evil ones so that we may give it to him, and his other worshippers may save humanity from the evil of his Brother and from the evil of the Crawling Chaos. _Ia Kthanid!_"

"_Ia Kthanid!_

"Let the Keeper of Secrets present themselves!" declared the red-veiled figure.

Another figure stepped forth from the crowd, to stand before the writing blackness in the middle of the room. Unlike the rest of the group, it was wearing robes of what would have been white under normal light, making it even harder to see, for it lacked the shine of the gold garments.

"_Ia Kthanid!_", it called out.

"Oh Keeper of Secrets, the one who risks the most against the evil of the Hand of the Crawling Chaos, the Ashcroft Foundation, have you taken the words of truth from the other Friends?"

"I have taken the truth, and I have recorded it. _Ia Kthanid!_ It shall go unto him, via his chosen servitor, and from there it shall be used to strike blows at the heart of the corruption of the NEG. To save us all from the evil of the Crawling Chaos and from the Dark Brother of our Lord."

The red-robed veiled inclined its head. "So be it ordained!"

"So be it ordained!" the Keeper responded. "Master, we could have you call forth the Chosen of our Lord, so that we may speak with it and present it with our unworthy offerings."

The red-veiled individual raised their hands. "Is it the assent of the Friends that we call down the Chosen of our King and Lord, so that we may offer what little information we have obtained? Is it sufficient to be a worthy offer? Call out His name if you feel that we have fulfilled the task set to us?"

"_Ia Kthanid!_", a good majority of the room called out, the sound of their voices echoing and rebounding off the walls.

"So be it ordained!" The figure removed its red veil, revealing that, underneath the concealing garment, was a pleasant looking, slightly balding middle aged man, of Japanese origin. "_Ia Kthanid!_ We are equal before him, and his Chosen. Show his Chosen your face, so that He may know you. Only the Keeper of Secrets must go without this gift, for the Keeper is our scapegoat and so must remain unknown, so that their duties may be carried out." His voice was no longer that of an anonymous androgyne with the removal of the sound-altering veil, but one which seemed much more right for his face.

The Keeper melted back into the strange yellow light, already almost invisible in the hallucinogenic smoke. Around the centre, the rest of the sect was unmasking, removing their yellow veils, and producing a set of normal looking faces, perhaps a little more human and middle aged than the main population. The Nazzadi among them were especially prominent; patches of darkness floating in the yellow lit fog.

"Now, come! Chosen of Kthanid, we humbly present our gift to you! We, the Friends of the Third Circle, offer our knowledge so that mankind may be saved."

The group began to chant, slow, sonorous, ritualised words in a language which sounded nothing like the tongues spoken day-to-day in human-controlled territories. Slowly, matching the pulses of their cadences words, the bubbling, boiling black mass began to rise up, and as it did, the darkness fell away, leaving only a reflective golden mass. The lights around the room pulsed brightly, leaving a burning afterglow in the eyes of the spectators.

As their vision had cleared, the servitor of their Lord could clearly be seen. A golden figure, statuesque in proportions stood before them, with no trace of the former dark fluid. It was vaguely female in appearance, but its anatomy was like that of a doll; nothing was evident despite its nakedness. And it was not quite human; it blended certain draconic elements in its curved claws and backwards-facing knees.

The masses fell to their knees.

And the figure opened its eyes.

"_Ia Kthanid!_" it said softly, in an androgynous contralto.

And there was much rejoicing.

~'/|\'~

It was almost 3am, many hours later, when the last two individuals left the room. They had been dribbled out strategically, to minimise the chance of anything amiss being detected by the New Earth Government. As an area outside of an arcology, the nearest one being Tokyo-3 itself, it was far less scrutinised than the superstructures themselves.

And that suited the pair just fine.

Of course, certain things were lost by keeping away from the arcologies. The lack of the rigid control from policing, for one, meant that the crime rate was considerably higher out under the real sky. There were whispers that the NEG didn't really care, as it provided an incentive for people to move into the monitored cities, where they could be subject to very frequent blood checks and periodic brain scans, all in the name of security.

But under the dark sky, a legacy of the reduced levels of light pollution even this close to Tokyo-3, the man and woman felt safe. He was clad in a smart, comfortable light coloured suit, made of modern artificial fibres interwoven with a heat transfer lattice which which regulated body temperature near perfectly, while she wore dark, formal business wear, of a Nazzadi cut despite her Japanese human ancestry. They obviously had money. They also had a company car less than five minutes away.

And a little butterfly badge, made of nanofactory diamond, on their lapels.

"Well," the woman said, "that went well." She flexed her shoulders, and reached around her back, scratching the small of her neck.

The man made a small noise in his throat.

She slowly lowered her arm. "I'm sorry, Huhugr. My mistake. But I was stuck in that imaginary inanity for too many hours." She smiled, a perfect, symmetric grin on a supermodel-quality face. "How about we get something to eat on the way back."

A very attentive observer would have noticed that these was something about the hang of the cloth that didn't quite sit right. It seemed tighter than it appeared from the outside, if that sentence made any sense.

The man shrugged, the expensive cloth sliding over his body without creasing or crumpling. "I think not. I'd rather not linger here. We don't need the inconvenience of some overenthusiastic local police deciding that this is not a safe area to be in, and deciding to give us a lift home. It would be nice, though, to blow off some steam. I know we had to be called in to give those idiots a show, and I know you were needed. I just don't know why I had to get stuck under that stupid robe." He grinned too, a far more malicious reckoning. "I'm sure I will have fun tonight, though, helping ensure the survival of the species."

The woman shot him a glance. "Your inferior species, you mean. We're the future. You're just tagging along because you are superior to the base." There was a slight hint in the tone of the conversation that this had been said between them many times, and they'd entirely given up hope of persuading the other.

He flapped his hand. "Yes, yes. So you go on. But, honestly," he continued, "I do see the purpose of these little sects. They're such a useful information source. It's an exchange, even if they don't see it as such. We get information, and they get bullshit."

The woman smirked, the malignancy somehow fitting for the face despite its beauty. "It's hilarious when the OIS or the FSB raid them. 'No, we're not an evil cult'," she said, her voice entirely shifting to a deep male bass. "'You're the evil ones, under the control of the cult. And we don't worship Cthulhu, Lord of the Deep Ones! We worship his good brother, Kthanid, who is like him, but shiny!'" She laughed, a silver peal in the quiet night's air, as she returned to her previous voice. "Humans are such idiots. What kind of an idiot would believe that there are nice, friendly 'Elder Gods' who help humanity against the depredations of the Great Old Ones? That there exists Good, and Evil, aligned along some kind of primitive elemental correspondence?"

"Apparently, a surprising number of people," the man replied, scrolling down the text on the screen of his wrist-mounted PCPU.

"Honestly, it's like some old myth, like what the Vikings, the Christians, the Aztecs... pretty much everyone, come to think of it, believed," snorted the woman.

"Now, now. I wouldn't insult one of His jaunts in that manner," the man chided, gently. "One missed call... excuse me for a moment," he said, flicking on the touchpad to activate the implanted headphones and microphone. "And deal with them," he added, nodding his head backwards towards a small street gang, of three youths, two Nazzadi and one xenomix, trying to sneak up behind them.

With almost liquid grace, the woman turned to face them, taking a step forwards while smiling in what seemed to be genuine amusement.

They stared at her for a moment.

She stared back.

The leader of the gang, the female xenomix, whose white facial markings were not quite symmetric, waved the katana she was holding her right hand hand , as she pointed a gun at them with the other. The other two had rather large knives, which they were holding in a threatening position.

The woman cocked her head.

The pistol was a cheap, Stallag branded one. Stallag, the bane of NEG law enforcement. At the time of the Migou invasion of Russia, one of their major major arms manufacturers had spent their last time designing a range of weapons which could be made with parts from a civilian issue nanofactory, from parts of legal non-weapons.

It had been a great success. They had designed a range of weaponry that any civilian, with access to some basic parts and the know-how to take the legal items apart, could build. The anti-Migou resistance in Russia had held out for several years, raiding Nazzadi Loyalist and Blank encampments for supplies, while doing what damage they could.

The problem had been that they had designed a range of weapons that any petty street crook could make from their home nanofactory. And they couldn't just make the parts illegal, because they were needed for many legally producible goods. The production of those legal items could be monitored, of course, but it wasn't too hard to conceal the purchase by spreading them out over time or using different machines. And so petty criminals all across the NEG were armed with somewhat reliable, very cheap guns, which lacked the fire sensors, ballistics records, or onboard monitoring systems of legal firearms.

This, understandably, drove the law enforcement mad.

All of this ran, almost instinctively, though the black-suited woman's head, as she stared at the young xenomix; maybe eight years younger than her. This gang was fairly poor quality, as they lacked proper firearms, they were carrying an illegal gun, and they really looked like a wild haired gang of teenagers.

Perfect.

They wouldn't be missed.

"What do you want?" she said, putting a stammer of fear (so alien to her, now) in her voice.

The xenomix grinned, revealing that she had the chisel-like teeth of the Nazzadi side of her family. "Give us all your _onimaly_ money, your _onimaly_ pissy-pews, and maybe we'll let you live."

"You want us to get to the Okinawa facility?" the man, Huhugr said calmly into his PCPU, ignoring the drama around him. "Certainly, but that will take a few days for the transfer arrangements... I understand.... Yes... Yes," he paused, listening for a while. "Yes... Oh, we're fine here."

This utterly infuriated the petty gang leader, whose subordinates were ordered to grab the black-suited woman.

It turned out to be quite a mistake, when they found that what they had taken to be a black, formal suit of a Nazzadi cut was actually part of her body, insofar as terms like "her" and even "body" could be applied to the amorphous black non-Newtonian fluid, which grabbed onto their faces, and didn't let go. The bodies thrashed around, as the woman-thing (now not really anything more than a pillar of black goo, with the face 'she' had chosen to wear flayed across the surface) forced her substance down their throats, into both the respiratory and digestive systems, spreading out and tearing the bodies apart from the inside.

'She' let a certain amount of oxygen pass through her body, though, into their tar-like fluid-filled lungs.

It wouldn't do to let them die too quickly.

Naturally, the gang leader screamed and panicked, pumping the trigger on her semiautomatic wildly. Of course, such mindless, prehuman terror was not conducive to such things as fine motor control, rational though, or aiming (neither the concept nor the ability), and so all she did was make a lot of noise, send one bullet into the shaven Nazzadi's abdomen, and another into the suited man, taking him in the thigh.

The fire stopped when he screeched and part of his leg peeled off, as first one rubbery tentacle and then another, which wrapped themselves around both arms, inhuman strength lifting the grey-skinned girl into the air, and sending her weapons clattering to the ground.

Huhugr smiled, widely (too widely, as his mouth split apart into a beak), watching as the company car pulled up, even as the hole in the greyish flesh that had been his leg closed up.

"Well, looks like I was wrong. You get a meal, and it even came with a toy!" he said in a delighted tone, wrapping the gang leader up in more of the mass of tentacles which had once comprised his legs.

The gang leader could only scream helplessly into the thing that blocked her mouth as the black pillar of goo flowed into the car, taking both her friends into its mass, as the betentacled monstrosity grinned at her, before dragging her in too.

~'/|\'~

The Chrysalis Corporation – Evolving Processes from Within

~'/|\'~


	14. Chapter 11: To Play Always

**Chapter 11**

To Play Always

~'/|\'~

The Deputy Representative was waiting for Gendo Ikari when he returned to his office.

_Ah. The old man is exceptionally annoyed about something. Now to see if this will this escalate to a true confrontation... I do not believe so._

Gendo held a small, faint smile on his face, as much to mask the annoyance that he was experiencing as to annoy his former mentor.

"Where were you?" asked Fuytusuki, his voice perfectly level and impassive, perhaps with a hint of curiosity. That alone showed the man's irritation; he was normally more expressive than that.

Gendo didn't answer at first, instead walking straight to his desk, and ensuring that the wards remained intact. He nodded once, in satisfaction, then spoke;

"Some mutual friends had information about a potentially useful asset. It was necessary to liaise with certain of them, as well as pass on information about activities of AHNUNG." Gendo pushed his glasses back up to the bridge of his nose with an index finger. "Certain individuals compromised will suffer accidents over the next week."

The white-haired individual merely stared at the younger man. He quite obviously wasn't going to accept it without more information.

Gendo sighed. "The potential asset was a TDE available and detected both by the TPDD flare and the characteristic amnesia in the individual suffering Type-6 _Seelenversetzung_."

"A Temporally Displaced Entity?" queried Fuyutsuki. "Intentional or accidental? Human or xeno?"

Gendo gazed out over the top of his glasses. "A Yithian TDE, to be exact. The individual suffering Type-6 _Seelenversetzung_ was, prior to the incident, resident in Toyko-3. The entity had only just entered this timeplane, and since the subject was still at school, the personality change and amnesia set off systematic alarm bells. You can see now why I felt it was so urgent to obtain the asset."

The older man leant forwards. "Did you get it?" he asked, in an urgent tone of voice. "All prior attempts have either lead to the death of the _Seelenversetzung_ Y-Entity or its escape via TPDD."

Gendo's mask cracked then, a flare of real anger surging through, muscles tensing in his jawline. "It was captured, but not by us." The anger was suddenly gone, locked away behind an utterly neutral face. "The Children of Chaos got there first. They had subverted the local OIS; during custody transfer, the subject just disappeared. Not literally, but the data trail goes dead."

A look of worry filled Fuyutsuki's eyes. "Oh dear," he said, quite fully aware of the inadequacy of that statement.

"Quite," stated Gendo, clamping back down in his emotions and hiding them behind the mask again. "We can but hope that the Em model of Temporal Dynamics is the true one. If the Fujiwara Static Hypothesis is true, then the Children of Chaos have just obtained a map for the events that are to come." The man fell silent. "And we are all doomed."

"No entity which is in any way comprehensible to our mode of thought will be able to resist a dedicated interrogation by the extranormal assets that Chrysalis have available," replied Fuyutsuki, his voice morose. "Even assuming **He** will not involve himself." The old man shuddered. "And the records we have, of the Peaslee, Bhati and Alvarez Cases, show that the Y-Entities can be understood; they operate fairly close to us on the Mabbott Logarithmic Sapience Scale" He paused. "Our best hope, then, is that the individual was suffering from Type-6 _Seelenversetzung_ for reasons unrelated."

Gendo got out of his seat, and walked over to the edge of the room, his gait that of a much older man.

"We can but hope," he said softly, gazing up at the false stars in the night-time ceiling of the Geocity. " If the Fujiwara Static Hypothesis is true, then everything has failed. I will devote an ORACLE cycle to trying to intuit anything about what they have found."

He stood there, staring up.

Fuyutusuki cleared his throat.

"Have you read the PsychEvals for your s... for the Third Child?"

Gendo did not turn to face his former mentor.

"Yes. First Stage AWS, of the Navidson sub-type, if I am any judge. Frankly, he was lucky to escape with so little." The Representative exhaled. "He will be fine. Do not remove him from the active duty rosters. No more Heralds are predicted before CATO, which exists to fulfil the Texts, and so there will be a period of relief."

The white-haired man made an annoyed noise. "I do know that, Ikari, just as you do. There is no need to explain things to me in that manner."

"It is necessary to keep such things in mind. We must never forget that we are shaping events to fit the Texts so that we may break from then when we wish, not playing their game to the end. Ultimately, the greater good of our plan means that we must sacrifice some pawns, but it would be foolish to dispose of assets before their full use has been extracted. And so we must conserve resources by whatever means we can extract."

"It is fortunate that the EFCS exists." Fuyutsuki paused, a faint aura of nervousness suddenly radiating around him. "That is, the noetic filtering side-effects of the EFCS are fortunate."

"Indeed." Gendo continued to stare out the transparent walls.

Behind him, Gendo heard the Deputy Representative turn and leave, his shoes clicking on the clean white surface.

_I'm sorry, Yui.  
__  
This will not have been for nothing, I promise you. I will make sure of it._

~'/|\'~

Misato leant on the balcony, and gazed down at the lab area, cup of coffee in hand. Ritsuko was explaining the latest research idea to Asuka and Shinji.

"... and so we'd like you both to be wearing the A-10 Clips while we put you through the new intensive training regime."

Asuka shrugged. "It makes no difference to me. I wear them already. And I don't really see the point of the training. I don't need it." She paused. "Now, Shinji, on the other hand, needs the practice to get him up to my level..."

"You know, that's exactly why you both need it," called down Misato.

Asuka glanced up towards the elder woman, eyes momentarily widening as she recognised her presence. "Why?" she asked bluntly, with a hidden undertone of hostility.

"Because, frankly," the Major replied coldly, "the last operation was a mess. You obstructed his lines of fire, he isn't used to operating with others, and both of you failed to operate as a small unit. Now," the Major admitted, "it is our fault for not having done this as soon as you were positioned together, but we see now how necessary it is."

"But..." protested Asuka, before the Major cut her off.

"Protest will not be tolerated."

The red-headed girl flinched slightly, at the singularly un-Misato-like attitude, before her face settled in a blank mask.

"And will the girl w... that is, the First Child be joining the training?" she asked in an excessively polite tone, hiding her disappointment.

"It was deemed that the First Child was unsuitable for the intensive training programme," answered Ritsuko, stepping around into the line of sight between Asuka and Misato. "She will practice with you in Immersion Training Simulations in the dummy bodies, but the real issue, at the moment, is the level of animosity between you two. This is, in part, what the regime is designed to remedy."

"There isn't animosity between us two," Asuka countered. "There might be a... healthy exchange of ideas, sometimes, but I wouldn't call it animosity."

Both Ritsuko and Misato stared at her for a while, silently. Her eyes flicked between the two of them. "That's right, isn't it, Shinji?"

The boy slowly turned to look at the other pilot. Slightly bloodshot eyes stared out from over noticeable bags. He stared at her for a moment, as if not quite comprehending.

"I suppose," he finally said.

Misato winced. The after-effects of the fiasco that had been the fight against the most recent Herald (assigned, almost retroactively from how fast the thing had been slain, the code-name Shalim-Shacar, in recognition of its apparently dual nature) had reminded her of what they had been really doing. Namely, sticking teenagers in arcanocyberxenobiological weapons of war, up against monstrosities even more horrific than the ones she had seen back when she had been in the frontlines in the Aeon War.

_All but one, that is_, a small voice whispered in her ear.

It was horrifically amoral, only avoided violating several major laws due to the technicalities they had managed to find, and undeniably effective. That was the worst part.

_I wish those two had been in Tibet._

For Shinji, it had been the sight of that pseudo-Zone which had briefly formed before its closure which had left in his current state, afraid of the dark and having problems sleeping. When they had finally released him from the Clinic, three days after they had given Asuka a clean bill of mental health, she had seen the diagnosis notes. The Navidson sub-type; a comparatively milder variant, at first, in that the symptoms could be contained and the cause attacked and removed, was still no laughing matter. She had found out what had happened to the first individual to exhibit those symptoms, after reading the Clinic notes, and it had not been pleasant reading. The second individual mentioned had watched an illicit text authored by the first, and the subsequent breakdown of his mental state had been fortunately recorded in personal, analytical notes on the book. Even the censored, OIS provided summary had provided too much information.

And stirred certain memories, best forgotten.

_the coal black eyes stared up at her, the man-sized figure somehow dwarfing her Blizzard_

Misato shook her head, and focussed back on the figures below. She frowned, as the conversation seemed to have jumped.

"... so we're to do a mixture of martial arts training... small-units..." Asuka was saying, as she ran her eyes down the list on a tablet PCPU, "in-Eva practice..."

Ristuko nodded. "And quite a bit more. But the main thing will be to spend as much time working together as possible. By the end of it, we want you utterly familiar with each other, and, more importantly, fully trusting each other."

Both Asuka, and Shinji, snapping out of his reverie, recoiled slightly at that.

"You have to be able to co-operate in perfect unison," continued the scientist, who apparently hadn't noticed the dual flinches. "Ideally, as a squad you could be perfectly synchronised, but... issues arise with that level of precision, so we'll have to see how coordinated we can make you two. You're already living together, which makes things easier." A slight smile crept onto her face. "But I think you're going to be seeing quite a bit more of each other."

The two glanced at each other, eyes locked for several long seconds, before they both looked away together. The mimicry of unison was somewhat spoiled by Shinji letting his head slump down, hands covering tired eyes and massaging his forehead.

Asuka made an annoyed noise in the back of her throat.

"I'm already getting a headache," she muttered.

"You'll live," was the heartless reply from the blond woman. "Now, you have a training exercise in the gym on level 12 in ten minutes. Don't be late." When they hadn't moved, she added, "That means, 'Please leave my lab, as we have work to do'. Shoo."

Misato watched the pair walk out, especially noting the look of disgust on Asuka's face from the Doctor Akagi's patronising tone.

"Was that really necessary?" she called down.

Ritsuko shrugged. "Not necessary, no, but it seemed like the easiest way." She sighed, an undercurrent of resentment and annoyance evident in her voice. "I wasn't lying, though. You know, the Foundation and the NEG have together ordered me to strip all of the armour from 01 and 02 and submit it for independent analysis."

Misato paled. "What? Are they mad? That leaves us with only Zero-Zero operational!"

"I know. It's stupid, and both Representative Ikari and the Deputy Representative fought it." She sighed again. "They were overruled by higher ups in the Foundation."

"It's funny to think that _Gendo Ikari_ has superiors," the black haired woman said in a thoughtful tone of voice. "You get so used to his authority that you forget about the Board of Directors and the CEO." She paused. "I don't think I even know any of their names. It's the continental Representatives you always hear about; Gendo for Ashcroft Europe, that woman... Mariscy? Marescy? You know who I mean, the one with blue hair for Ashcroft South America."

"Meresky de Terra," corrected Ritsuko. "She's one of the ones who chose to take one of those Earth-centred "surnames" as a way of distinguishing themselves from the Loyalists back in the Nazzzadi Civil War." She paused. "But we're going off on a tangent."

"As usual."

"Quite. The point is, they've only left us one with operational Eva, and the least advanced one at that."

"But... I can't see a reason why they'd do that?" Misato protested, in an exasperated tone of voice. "Are they trying to get us killed or something?"

"They claim," Ritsuko said, rolling her eyes to show what she though about the claim, "that they have to see what the effects of immersion in an aleph-one dimensional space has upon the armour, whether the AT-Field really shields the things within from the Zone effect. I can't see why they can't be content with one set, personally. As it is, it takes us down to the back old days of no replacements whatsoever."

"Rits, those 'bad old days' were two weeks ago," Misato replied, with a bitter smile.

"I know." The blond woman sighed. "As it is, I don't think we can carry out proper in-Unit training. We just don't have the spares. And I think that's why they did it."

Misato nodded. "The idea that the Evangelion,when they are active are somehow summoning the Heralds. Yes, that would make sense. After the attack of Yam, in C2, and all the attacks which have occurred since 01 was started up, I can certainly see how military counter-intelligence might think that."

Ritsuko snorted. "I'm not even going to make the obvious joke about the military and 'counter-intelligence'." She shook her head. "They want to keep us inactive,until," she looked around, "we're needed for _it_."

The black-haired woman scowled. "Typical handwavers and theorists. No idea on how we actually have to run a military operation, and little things like the necessity for live training."

The scientist massaged her brow, and forced a smile onto her face. "Talking about handwavers, you still haven't finished all of the masses of after-action and phenomenon reports that the last deployment generated." She saw the woman up on the balcony visibly slump, which made the smile somewhat more real. "Now, you can shoo too. I have a lot of work that needs to be done" The smile vanished. "We lost another Magi Operator, you know," she added in a soft voice.

Misato winced. "Another one? Who was it?" she asked, more gently.

"Olivia Pierce, one of the newer immersion technicians. You wouldn't know her. Barely six months out of surgery." She sighed. "The DMIN, specifically the Etemennigur sub-module glitched while they were analysing the data from the pseudo-Zone. Less than a second of full exposure, without protection, but it was enough to induce Terminal AWS. She's alive, but..."

The way Ritsuko's voice trailed off spoke quite clearly about her expectation that any recovery from Terminal-Phase Navidson Syndrome could ever occur.

The black-haired woman inclined her head. "I'm sorry," she said, as she left, disappearing from the balcony.

Dr Akagi shook her head, as she returned to filling out the Health and Safety report for the accident.

_I am far too familiar with Form 1198/CTR_, she thought. _And someday someone is going to have to fill this out for me._

She shut down the morbid thoughts. She was still sane, and still functional. She had dodged the bullet so far, and Dr Miyakame had dodged it even longer. There was still hope.

_Is it really hope to not be permitted to give in to the blessed oblivion of madness and no longer be forced into an endless mantra of 'I did what had to be done'?_, a little part of her brain asked. It was, likewise, ignored.

Hopefully, the new training regime should enable the two Children (and children, she reminded herself), to actually co-operate. It had been a rather good idea, after all, for that little modification to Misato's plans. Really, she was quite surprised that no-one else had spotted it, that recurrent little theme in their interactions. A moment of serendipity, induced by the Second Child's pride.

Such fortune.

Of course, smugness over what she had found out (even if the people she could actually tell could be counted on two hands) would probably prove to be necessary for what she was about to do.

She was going to have to take Doctor Miyakame up on his offer.

~'/|\'~

The remotely operated drones swarmed over the entity, diamond-bladed drills digging into the polypous, partially-unreal material in those brief moments when it existed. These holes were filled by the second set of autonomous probes, which flew in and extruded a fine lattice of superconducting fibres, plant-like, into the body of the beast. Around these tendrils, the flesh hardened and solidified, the curvature of space-time around the D-Engines of the probe forcing the creature into solidity.

The trapped fiend screamed, a thin whistling noise which extended far into the ultrasound. Its call heard no answer.

From the other side of a viewscreen, the autocensors sanitising the sight, the spectacle was being watched.

"How is it going?" asked Doctor Anton Miyakame, stepping up to the team supervisor.

The man jumped slightly, the motion slopping black coffee over the floor and Doctor Miyakame's shoes.

"Sorry... sorry... sorry," the supervisor apologised. "Let me just find something to mop this up with..."

The older man shook his head. "It's okay, Mr Xi. Shoes dry. Now, how is it going?"

"The base organism has been isolated, obviously, and the wards are holding," Chen said, as they moved away from the spill. "We've got roughly 12% of its body by volume subverted and under control, and a further 31% is contested." He took a deep breath. "I'm sorry, sir, but this is going much slower than usual due to the fact that the extra-normal entity is only 'real'," he made inverted commas with his fingers, "less than 30% of the time. We won't be able to meet the deadline for complete control." His face took on a placating expression. "I'm sorry this means that that the build team won't be able to start on the Erel prototype as predicted."

The younger man glanced at the head of Project Engel. The other man didn't even appear to be paying attention, instead gazing at the autocensor screen.

He waited for a moment.

"For that reason, sir, I believe..."

Dr Miyakame made a noise in the back of his throat, a sort of mix between a gurgle and a hum. "I'm sure you do. Nevertheless, your group's tardiness is holding up work on the Erel. We need a counter to the Dragonfly desperately, Chen. I don't think I need to explain the stakes here."

The supervisor nodded his head. "Yes, sir."

"I assigned you, along with many of the others from Daeva, here because of your previous experience in the militarisation of unconventional ENEs. Was I mistaken?"

"Before, we had more than a few weeks!" Chen snapped back, his frustration overcoming him. He flinched slightly, as he realised what he'd done. He could feel the eyes of the rest of the room upon him.

Evidently, Dr Miyakame could see the others, too. "Get back to work, all of you!" he said, his tone angry despite the fact that he hadn't raised his voice. "Xi, come with me!" he added, as he turned to leave, his visage like thunder.

Chen Xi followed the man who looked so much older than he really was. This was worrying; very much so. Dr Miyakame was rumoured, from the time he had spent with the long-term Engel members, to have a real temper, and very little patience. He was said to barely sleep; a driven man who would not permit himself or anyone else on the team to perform at less than 100% efficiency. And, in darker whispers, he was more than a little crazy, leaving his teams on edge around him. Brilliant, yes, but brilliant like a cracked diamond; fundamentally broken and flawed. And sharp, very sharp, in the mental sense, but also with people around him.

The older man stopped, so suddenly that Chen almost walked into his back.

"Yes?" he said, in a more normal tone of voice.

"Nothing, sir," Chen stammered.

He received a glare for his troubles. "Not you." Anton Miyakame paused for a few seconds, turning so that the younger man could see that one finger was pressed up against an ear in the way that showed he was using implanted headphones.

"Sorry."

The doctor removed the finger. "Just go," he snapped. "Make suer you have more progress next time I check."

He let the younger supervisor move out of sight, before he put back the finger, resuming the conversation.

"Sorry, you said there was an incoming call from Project Evangelion?" He paused. "What's the reference number?" There was a lengthy pause, which continued even after his secretary had stopped speaking. "Will, divert all other calls. I'm going to a secure room; shift this up to the highest security protocols," he told his secretary, eventually, as he began to walk rapidly towards the nearest one, his pace putting a lie to the premature ageing of his face.

It took a few minutes for the high security to synchronise. The quickening of his breath showed the stress that the wait induced. Slowly, the breath slowed down again, as he clamped down on the primitive fight-or-flight reflex.

Finally, there was the short tune, generated procedurally from the machine chatter, which told him that the link was made. Slowly, he pressed a button on his PCPU.

There was silence on the other side of the line, too.

"Doctor Miyakame," a voice finally said.

"Doctor Ritsuko Akagi," he replied. It said something that he still unconsciously distinguished between the two women who would have responded to merely the title and the surname.

"I..." there was a catch in the woman's breath, "... I would like to, on behalf of Project Evangelion, in my role as the Director of Research and Development, to take you up on your offer of cooperation between our two Projects." The reluctance in her voice was evident.

Anton Miyakame struggled to keep his voice calm. "I understand," he said, trying to conceal his elatement. "I will instruct my subordinates to liaise with your subordinates, both for the access to Project Engel's nanofactories and the offer of more arcanotechnicians and -engineers." He paused. "I must admit, Ritsuko, I was not entirely honest with you at the first meeting," he confessed. "It was not just a spontaneous offer. I have lived with the guilt for twelve years now. I have tried to work out what went wrong, and failed. I thought I could keep it under-control, drive it into the work on Engel, but... the sight of Yui's son, and Kyoko's... daughter bought it out."

There was a frigid silence on the other end of the line.

"We all have our debts to pay." He laughed bitterly. "That's the real message of _Frankenstein_, not what pop culture would tell you. It isn't a warning about 'playing god'. It's that you should not mistreat or abandon that which you create."

He coughed.

"I abandoned Project Evangelion the day after the second accident, driving myself into other work to salvage what I could from what I saw as a failed project, to make some use of it. You've seen the Engels; what they share with the Evas and how they differ. But like it or not, I'm one of the fathers of the Evangelions, and I owe the Project a debt."

~'/|\'~

The only noise in the room was a periodic thick, viscous splash. The false sunlight from the arcology dome streamed in through the windows, giving light to the small room through the clouds of incapacitating gas which had still not fully dispersed.

What it illuminated was mostly red.

Agent Mary Anderson let her orange eyes skip across the room, not looking too closely at the decorations painted in vital fluids in the walls nor the lifeless ragdolls, that were once people, piled on the floor. The autocensor installed in the helmet was necessarily turned off, in case an Extra-Normal Entity like, for example, _talpa bustum_, had burrowed into the corpses, waiting to ambush anyone who investigated the bodies. She was simply glad that her armour had an independent air supply; to add smell to the sensory experience would simply be intolerable. She just grasped her LCG tighter, peered through the eyesockets of the helmet, and hoped that if whatever had killed all these people showed up, it was vulnerable to 5mm railgun rounds.

And she was annoyed.

_This is the fourth tip-off for a cult headquarters. And, again, they're all dead before we can take any of them in._

Someone is fucking with us.

The floor shook as a three metre figure made its way down the hallway. Although the building met the mandatory construction standards, Special Agent Tennant, in his Centurion Powered Armour, was still leaving dents in the floor. The splintering synthwood just couldn't take the mass of metal and arcanotechnology upon it.

"The rest of the building is clear, too," he reported, voice metallic and distorted over the external speakers. "Nothing alive. Four more rooms like this on the top floor, two more on this level."

"Any signs of Extra-Normal Activity?" asked Agent Ilosa, another one of the specialists, like herself, dragged out on these missions.

Normally, the dedicated strike teams which the OIS had would have performed missions like this, but everything was utterly chaotic for the Office of Internal Security throughout London-2. There had been a eruption of Zoners, those maddened parapsychics who gained power in return for sanity; although it was not a conscious trade. One of those, even when newly erupted, called for a Powered Armour team to take down; if they had gravikinetic powers or could tear a man's mind apart with a glare, often that would not be enough.

And they were not the only problems. In most cases, the OIS would have been able to call upon the FSB and the arcology police, despite the traditional dislike between the forces. But, dating back to late August, the arcology had suffered elevated levels of extra-normal activity, And she wasn't thinking about the attacks by the Dagonite prototype walker in mid-August, the arcanobiological missile-like lifeform that hit the arcology in late September, or the destruction of that Migou battlestation. No, there had been spates of summoning, unlicensed sorcerers seemingly going crazy and calling as many xenoentities into the city without care for being caught, monsters breaking though the arcology defences and preying on citizens, and waves of ordinary citizens succumbing to Terminal-Grade Late Onset Aeon War Syndrome (without any prior record of mental illness).

"No ENA," answered Tennant. "The house was warded, too. Wards are still up."

"That means that either they were killed by something conventional," Mary said, the scepticism in her voice evident as she gazed over the mass of bodies, "... or whatever killed them is still in here." She had been awake for almost thirty hours, and was already approaching the legal limit for operational deployment. Only the drugs in the systems of the OIS team were keeping them operating at full capacity, and and all across London-2 people were being pushed well beyond what the base human could cope with, just to deal with all the incidents flooding in.

"Or someone lowered the wards to let them in, before raising them again," said Ilosa, his voice nervous.

The consequences of this was that the forces that were trained to deal with the extra-normal were just as occupied as the OIS was with the sorcerers and parapsychics. Fresh agents were on emergency transfers, but you couldn't just get on a plane and go somewhere. You needed a safe flightpath, and preferably one of the comparatively rare stealthed plans.

_And in the meantime, people like me get to cover the gaps,_ Agent Anderson thought. _The OIS training covers the basics for extra-normal entity combat, and dealing with rogue parapsychics and sorcerers, but, damn it, I'm a TSEAP operator, not a field agent. I wasn't recruited to do this kind of thing._

And now cases like this.

_Ph'nglui mglw'nafh ebg gu'vegr'ra vf gu'r pyhr, ebg gu'vegr'ra vf 'gur x'rl. G'uebhtu ebg 'guvegr'ra, guv'f zr'ffnt'r n'aq ny'y gur erf'g bs gur cf'rh'qb __Ybirpensgvna__ oy'ngure v' j'vyy vafreg z'nl or haq'refgb'bq,_ read the visceral messages on the wall, the words scrawled out individually, sometimes taking small parts of the plaster with them.

The helmet radio crackled into life, the slightly artificial sound of the voices carried on it evidence of the heavy encryption the comms systems was subject to.

"An L2AP team has been freed up to hold this site until the analysts arrive. ETA, 15 minutes. Keep frosty. Goldsmith out."

Despite the warning, several of the agents could be seen to relax, even under the full body armour. Oh, sure, the standard Extended Operation Enhancements kept you awake and alert, but after around thirty six hours, it started to get uncomfortable, especially if you were stuck in heavy body armour.

And they were pushing forty eight.

~'/|\'~

**Code:**

SECURITY AUTHORISATION QUERY:

[RFID Check] - Present  
Subject [Name]...

...

Overridden.

Override Authority... REDACTED

...  
[REDACTION CODE]: UmVk-\-YWN0-\-aW9u-\-IEF1-\-dGhv-\-cmlz-\-ZWQg-\-Ynkg-\-UHJv-\-amVj-\-dHMg-\-UGFy-\-YWdv-\-biBh-\-bmQg-\-RXZh-\-bmdl-\-bGlv-\-bg==

[Redaction Code] Accepted  
AF|SpecResPr|PrPara/PrEva – Dual Redaction

[Assigned Subject Identifier]: "Orpheus"  
[Sex]: F  
[Birth Sex]: F  
[Species]: Homo Sapiens Amlati  
[Clearance]: REDACTED. Clearance is sufficient.  
Registered [Sorcerer]: No  
Registered [Parapsychic]: No

Confirm [ID], Priority 1

Run [Full ID] Match...  
[Facial Recognition Matches]: Subject Matches Records.  
[Fingerprints Match]: Subject Matches Records.  
[Skin Sample Match]: Subject Matches Records.  
[Blood Sample Match]: Subject Matches Records.  
[Outsider Contamination]: Recorded as Negative on Central Database.  
Approved

Guest is provisionally confirmed as [Subject "Orpheus"]

Run [Security] Check...  
[Chemically Propelled Firearms]... Negative  
[Gas Propelled Firearms]... Negative  
[Electromagnetic Accelerator-Based Firearms]... Negative  
[Biological Contaminants in Bloodstream]... Positive  
Running [Analysis]...

...  
Please wait.

...  
[Biological Agents] match known infectious diseases in population.  
Are the diseases within the parameters to be a threat to security?... Negative  
Genetic engineering for increased morbidity or virulence?... Negative  
Analysis: No Hazardous [Biological Agents] in Bloodstream.

Proceed with checks.

[Micromachine contamination]... Present. Within expected Levels for Arcology Inhabitant.

[Micromachines] match approved list.  
[Hazardous Micromachine Contamination]... Negative

[Nanite Contamination]... Present. Within expected Levels for Arcology Inhabitant.

[Nanites] match approved list.  
[Hazardous Nanite Contamination]... Negative

[Radioisotope Contamination]... Within Approved Limits  
[Sorcerous Wards]... Negative  
[Bound Extra Normal Entities]... Negative  
[Subject Mass]... Within Approved Limits  
[REDACTED]... Negative  
[REDACTED]... Negative  
[REDACTED]... Negative  
[REDACTED]... Within Approved Limits  
[REDACTED]... Negative  
[REDACTED]... Within Approved Limits  
[Miscellaneous Checks]... Within Approved Limits.

...

Subject Approved for Entry

~'/|\'~

The inside of the lift was a cold, sterile white. Frankly, when the make-up of this apartment complex, buried deep in the guts of London-2 and so filled with Ashcroft workers who wanted to minimise their commute to the Geocity below, was considered, it was hardly surprising. These individuals had both the money and the exclusivity from the somewhat over-the-top security to ensure that something as simple as a lift remained clean.

Ken shivered. "How can Shinji live in a place like this?" he asked. "It's so... cold."

Toja shrugged. "It's not. I mean, it's a few degrees colder, but I think this area is meant to replicate the climate of an area a bit further north or something."

The other boy shook his head. "That's not what I mean. It's just so... seventies."

"Hey, people in the seventies liked white and these rounded corners. There doesn't seem to be a sharp angle in the place. But, yeah, modern stuff is just prettier. More personal."

"The outside arcology area is nice, though."

"Yeah. Most places, the rich places are around the edges, close to the real light. That's what I've heard But L2 has the rich places around the edge and in the centre, with everyone else in between. Like Tokyo-3, according to my dad." The Nazzadi paused. "I guess it's a Geocity underneath that does it."

Ken cocked his head. "Why don't people live there, come to think of it? You've got all these people living right above it, and all that untouched wilderness underneath."

Toja shrugged. "Dunno. My dad told me he refused housing there, back when we were moved here." He snorted. "Plus, it's not like Shinji would get cold if he's forced to live with the Red Devil. _Gareny raygi tyunadi lo pura zinabi_, after all."

"Huh?" Ken sighed. "I don't speak any Nazzadi, remember. Well... no, I don't speak any. At all."

"Sorry. Um. 'She has sufficient anger to melt a blizzard', basically," the black-skinned boy translated. "One of the Proverbs from the Falsehood," he said, referring to the name most commonly used by Intergrationists to refer to the fictional culture created by the Migou for the invasion fleet, "...about a female fire demon who stole winter, I think."

They stood in silence for a few moments.

"This is really a very slow lift," Ken pointed out. "It really shouldn't take this long to go up this many..."

The doors pinged open.

"... floors."

Toja sniggered slightly.

"Look, I'm serious. There's no way that we should have taken that long to go up."

The snigger became a snort.

"Oh, you're useless," the human sighed. "Forget about it."

The question, "What are you two idiots doing here?" drifted from the left, in a tone of voice which had both boys unconsciously straightening up.

"Ah, Class Rep," said Ken. "Why are you here?"

Hjikary rolled her eyes. "I asked first, but all right. I'm here to visit Asuka. She's been absent from school all week."

"Same here," blurted out Toja, "... only not for the Red... Asuka. We're seeing if Shinji is all right. He hasn't showed up at all, and hasn't been answering his PCPU."

"I think it was something Evangelion-related, personally," added Ken. "Certain rumours I've picked up mentioned some kind of massive ENE incursion which was pushed back. If that's true, it's not surprising they're absent."

"But if that's true," Hikary pointed out, "then why wouldn't they deploy Rei? She's been at school all week."

That was a question which could not be answered.

Ken summed it up with a 'Huh' as the trio approached their destination.

Pressing the buzzer produced no audible noise, but an eye-like camera swivelled on the ceiling to focus on them. Only after a few second could a noise be heard from the other side of the door. The display screen above the button changed to display the message, "Please wait."

After even more of a wait, the door finally slid open, to reveal Shinji and Asuka, stood side-by-side, A10 clips on head. They were wearing very tightly fitting grey one-piece suits which covered everything but their heads.

There were a few moments of shocked silence.

"Yes?" the two chorused together, in a somewhat weary tone of voice.

"Wha... what are you doing?" asked Hikary, shocked at how form-fitting the suits were and general appearance of impropriety. "What are you wearing!"

Shinji and Asuka sighed, simultaneously. "_We_ didn't chose these things. It was decided that we should train in full suits. But," they added, eyes narrowing, "they wouldn't release the normal plug suits, and so we got put in these old ones from the original Project."

"Original Project?" queried Ken, stepping forwards, any shock overcome by the mention of the development of military technology.

The pair of Children gave him a simultaneous glance, which, despite their differing opinions of him (and, incidentally, him of them), had very strong undercurrents of exasperation. "The normal plug suits are actually Project Engel technology, built off these," they jammed a finger towards their chests, "_things_.

"Okay..." replied Hikary, somewhat mollified by the reluctance. "Now, next things next. What on earth are you two doing? Why are you talking like that?!"

"Teamwork exercises," they answered.

"And stop talking like that," she snapped back.

"Sorry. That's also part of the," and the synchronisation was broken by Shinji's yawn, while Asuka continued, "teamwork exercises." She turned to glare at him. "Idiot! That was going really well!"

"Sorry," Shinji apologised, running his right hand over his face. "_You_ know I haven't been able to sleep enough."

"But that was working really well, and then you had to go and break it!" she retorted back.

Toja and Ken relaxed, as the Red Devil verbally tore into Shinji.

"And the natural order of the world is restored," they said, before looking at each other and flinching slightly.

Hikary shivered, and then groaned, one grey palm colliding with her forehead with a loud slap.

"Not you two as well."

There was a snort from behind them. The trio of visitors turned to find a uniformed Misato leaning against the wall, her hand clamped over her mouth, trying not to make a noise. Beside her, Rei stood, her face as impassive as carved marble, head tilted slightly to one side.

"Don't... don't," gasped Misato, in between peals of laughter, "don't... let me inter...interrupt your little c...comedy."

Shinji and Asuka glared at her. "You're not helping," they said in unison, tones equally annoyed, which just set her off further.

~'/|\'~

Once everyone had been sufficiently calmed down (a process which would have been easier for Misato if she had permitted herself alcohol, in Asuka's suspicions), there could actually be an explanation to the by-now-rather-confused visitors.

Hikary sat with the penguin beside her. As she listened to the rather convoluted (and she felt, contrived) exposition, she began to feel a certain degree of kinship with the uplifted bird. It appeared that it was the only sane individual in this household, even if it was a red-eyed penguin with a mohawk. Well, and the fact that despite it was funny looking, it was also quite cute.

She was pretty sure that its toothed maw was smiling at her, despite the fact that it was manifestly impossible for a beak to do that. She patted it on the head, which produced a "Wark".

She tuned back into the conversation.

"You should have told us earlier," said Toja to Misato, an amused smile on his face.

"So, how is the training going?" Hikary asked, glancing over at the network of... contraptions set up on the other side of the room, the morass of cables protruding from everywhere and the fact that they had torn out part of the wall to get access to more power cables, speaking of the fact that the gadgetry was new.

"Idiot!" yelled Asuka, sitting bolt upright in the long chair to glare at Shinji beside her, the AR goggles pushed up onto her forehead lit up in bright red. "You just hit me in the plug with the charge beam!"

"You didn't get out the way!" Shinji snapped back, in a manner quite a bit more adversarial than normal. He yanked his goggles up, and turned to face her, eyes flashing with the same rage. "I told you I was on A."

"B was further away! You're the one with the long-range weapon!"

Misato winced. "See for yourself."

Ken stared at the long seats, correct in his guess that they were pretty much replicas of the ones in the entry plugs, with eyes filled with technophiliac hunger. "So, what's exactly going on in these sims?" he asked.

"At the moment?" said Misato, before she was interrupted by the two Children.

"He's being useless!" stated Asuka, angrily.

"She's being useless!" was Shinji's simultaneous comment, with an identical emotional content.

"... yes," sighed the black-haired woman. "Well, they're getting rather good at mimicking each other, but it's not really producing an improvement in their effectiveness. They were _meant_ to be," directing a glare at the pair, "doing teamwork combat exercises. We've analysed their independent combat styles, and they're up against a pair of Virtual Intelligence opponents that mimic their styles exactly _without_ working together. The VIs have been set at a theoretical 100 synch rating, while they have been given a fixed rating of 50. It's _meant_ to force them to work together to overcome their own equals." She paused. "I'm not sure that I'm explaining it that well."

"Oh, no, it makes perfect sense," said Ken, nodding eagerly, his eyes slightly vacant.

Hikary shot a glance of disdain at him. She wasn't sure if it was the technophilia or the Misatophilia (she was sure that the boy was enjoying the sight of the uniformed Major a little too much for it to be proper) which was annoying her more at the moment, because, really, that wasn't a very good explanation at all.

"How am I meant to be able to deal with such an idiot!" the redheaded girl declared, face turned up to the ceiling. "It's not fair that I have to deal with someone who can't even manage to not shoot his own team-mate!"

"Say, Misato," observed Toja, smirking, "I really don't think this is fair on Asuka." That comment induced suspicious gazes from both the red-headed girl and Hikary; with the former focussed more on his jugular than his face. He spread his hands wide. "What? It's obvious that _das Ubermench_ is obviously far too good to lower herself to _team_ training," he said, layering on the sarcasm as he glared back at Asuka. "Perhaps Shinji should be practising with Rei, given that the NEG really does need its pilots to work well together." The smirk was wider now. "I'm not sure that someone who can't play with others even has a place on a basketball team, let alone a military force," he added, watching the flashes of emotion that his words induced on the redhead's face. It felt good to annoy that dislikeable bitch.

Asuka's fists contorted into balls.

_It would feel so good to just punch him in the face. Once, twice, three times, again and again. What does he know? About the Evangelions? About the military? About me? He's just some ignorant, stupid, ugly _baby _who knows nothing and does nothing ever! He'll never risk life or limb against anything like a Herald, so he can't comment!_

She could feel the ice-cold presence of the other pushing against those thoughts. She forced it back down.

"Toja!" snapped Hikary. "Apologise!" The Nazzadi actually appeared to be under some physical pain, as the force of the Class Representative's inexorable, unstoppable will bore down on him. "That kind of behaviour is completely out of order!"

Misato raised a hand. "No... that's a good point, actually. Military doctrine shows that cooperation and teamwork defeats individual brilliance on the strategic level." She looked up at the ceiling. "And, certainly, Rei is a lot better at following orders," she added, idly.

"But the Evangelions are, despite their strategic importances, still fundamentally operating at tactical levels due to their limited numbers," retorted Asuka, suppressing her burning rage so that she could talk to someone who really mattered, unlike the Nazzadi idiot. She tried to hide the hint of desperation in her voice, but it still crept out. "Small unit tactics still rely upon individual brilliance."

_Piloting is all I have! I am the designated pilot of Unit 02. And I am the best!_

"One-on-one, the Evas are inferior to the Heralds," pointed out the Major. "Ever single Herald since the first one we encountered has been a joint operation, whether with conventional military forces or other Evangelions... or, indeed, both. And, fundamentally, the pilots need to be able to work together." The Major narrowed her eyes, drawing to mind the Second Child's psychological profile. "I'm not sure we have a place for a soldier who cannot subjugate her ego to the greater good."

That remark cut right to the core of the redhead's sense of self. As Asuka saw it, she had two options. She could storm out of here. That would be cathartic. She could release the anger and frustration (and fear, she admitted to herself) in one way or another. And they'd have to apologise to her, or at least reassure her, or... something.

A sudden, ice-cold lucidity washed over her mind.

_No. They won't._

Misato, when she's like this, in her officer mode, only really cares about the mission. She puts the human feelings aside, along with the drunkenness and slobbery, and becomes some kind of perfect commander. I've seen her do this only a few times, but it's there. She wouldn't hesitate to remove me from Unit 02 if she thought she could get someone better

I'll show them that I'm the best. I'm the best that there can be.

And so, the only way to beat them is do play their game. I'll co-operate with the incompetent Third Child. I'll show that, together, we can beat anything they can throw at us. I'll force up his standards, and make it so that they can see that I'm _the one responsible for the increase in his skills. Whatever game they want to play, I'll beat them at it. No matter how much it takes._

She yanked the AR goggles back over her eyes.

Inside, tears welled up, hidden behind the projected display. It was okay. It was safe here. They couldn't see how much it meant.

She threw a glance at Shinji. "Get back in the seat, Third Child. We are going to do this until we can beat these mockeries," she said, the sudden lucidity levelling out her voice and leaving it suddenly monotonous. "I will **not** accept failure. From either of us." She cocked her head at Toja. "And next half-term's sport is Martial Arts, or so I've heard. **Be afraid.**"

Shinji slid his goggles down, too. This whole interruption had been incredibly annoying when he had been trying to concentrate on the training routine, making him almost irrationally angry when Toja had gone and provoked Asuka like that. Luckily, he was feeling calmer now, the anger gone, allowing him to focus with fresh clarity on this really difficult programme. He wrapped his hands around the joysticks, and triggered the "Ready" signal.

Misato relaxed, inside, even as a new AR simulation began, and as Hikary dragged Toja out to the kitchen and began shouting at him. She had quite a bit to say on his lack of manners and his spite. Even from the other room, Ken was still flinching as the words echoed through.

_It worked. Thank goodness. The psychologists told me that that was the emergency button for forcing her to do things, but I didn't expect Shinji's friend to just stumble on it like that. It worked, though._

I hope she never finds out that it was a paper threat. Ritsuko was very absolute that Rei could not do this special training, and did not need to.

And Rei's eyes widened slightly at what she had just seen.

_This will need to be evaluated. All of this. Pilot Ikari, Pilot Soryu. Everything._

And I can feel her_. The entity grows stronger._

Representative Ikari will want to know of this.

~'/|\'~

The thundering of the train beat out a staccato rhythm in the dark tunnel.

And that in itself was unusual, as Shinji had only ever seen old-fashioned trains in films. The noise he associate with a train was the quiet hum of an A-Pod propelling it over the magnetic rails, and that only if you were near the engine.

The inside of the train, despite the anachronistic method of movement, was perfectly modern, a duplicate of an ArcTransit carriage, the mainstay of the mass transit systems of the arcologies. Well, lit, with comfortable seats. This one was clean too, the pale blue floor and white walls spotless.

He looked through the window. Outside, it was pitch black. No, he thought. Pitch wasn't like this. This was too dark, a Stygian night which filled all around the train like an oil made of the concentrate essence of the night sky, that utter darkness that was only given by gazing into eternity.

The wall of the tunnel was less than a metre away. Who could have known that eternity could be encompassed in such a small length?

Instinctively, Shinji knew that the darkness... the dark walls were malevolent. No, that was not the right word. Malevolence implied intent, a care for what might be done. Malevolence required sapience.

Call it anathema, then, if you were to apply the futility of human labels to such a thing. But no label, no tag could truly describe that which ran less than a metre from the glass against which Shinji Ikari had pressed his face, the beat of the tracks a pounding rhythm that filled his head and matched his heart.

He pulled his face away from the glass. No breath marks were left on the glass, despite the temperature on the train, akin to that of a cool autumnal day. Curiously, he reached out one blue-grey hand and and poked a finger through the glass, which proved to be nothing of the kind, a fractured network of arachnid threads that shone like illuminated diamond. With one clean movement he tore through the shining lattice, and tensed his legs, ready to throw himself out into the darkness.

He blinked twice. His hand rested flat against the glass, pale skin the only point of contrast against a dark background.

_What is going on?_ he thought, with a strange lucidity that overlay the rising panic. _What is going on? What is going on? With the hand... and the window... and everything. Why I am I here?_

He had to keep away from the dark. The dark was evil... strange... wrong, in every possible way.

He looked up and down the carriage. At one end, to his left, the number '25' was illuminated in scarlet. At the other end, its twin read '26'.

The staccato beat of the train grew louder and louder, faster and faster, synchronised with his heartbeat so that he could not tell where one began and the other ended. As the train sped up, his heart thumped louder and louder, for such speed merely took him faster and faster into the unknown (and, indeed,unknowable), rushing through an eternity of void-wrapped tunnels with no way of seeing what lay ahead.

Or was the train speeding up as he grew more afraid, the terror that now gripped his body and mind empowering this strange place?

Or was there no difference? Was he the train, running into darkness, no clue of what lay ahead?

Breathing quickly, he headed towards the '26' and the door that adjoined to the next carriage. If he got to the end of the train, it might be possible to get off.

Shinji broke into a jog, eyes darting to either side. The door slide aside, parting down the middle to admit him to the next carriage. Breathing quickly, he gazed around the next carriage, slowing down but not stopping in his rush.

It was darker in this one. The lights overhead were dimmed, almost imperceptibly. Indeed, all the senses were muted, for the beat of the carriages was quieter too. Even the chill was dimmed.

Something inside Shinji snapped then, and the terror overcame his mind.

_I have to get out of here! I need to run away! I have to __**get out**__!_

An almost feral cry of fear escaped his mouth.

The jog became a dash, and then a sprint. The train beat faster and faster, as if trying to overcome his attempts to reach the end, and his heart pounded in his chest, and the two were one. Through seemingly endless carriages, he ran, doors opening at his passage only to seal themselves behind him.

If he had been thinking clearly, he might have noticed how, in each of the new cars, the lights were dimmer again, the train sounds weaker. But the observation that the terrible walls of the tunnel were getting closer, each new carriage bringing them centimetres closer would have been impossible, because the lack of a comparison against that loathsome planar void meant that such precision was not something that a human could have done on their own. But although each movement of the walls inwards could not be discerned, the way they closed in (or was it expansion of the train?) was inexorable.

Shinji Ikari fell to his knees, exhausted by the mad, mindless rush. Slowly, he looked up.

Before him, in the near total darkness, shone the number '26' in a now-dimmed red.

He whimpered slightly, and spun nervously, his breath coming quickly. Behind him, its baleful twin, '25' glimmered.

He could not escape this endless repeating cycle of '25' and '26'.

Slowly, he picked himself off the ground, pulling himself up using a seat. It no longer felt like something that someone would willingly sit in; the surface was rigid and cold, sleek like polished stone. Something crumbled under his hand as he stood, panting from the exertion.

Slowly, he turned his palm face up, dreading at what he might see.

There was a layer of what looked like paint, old and flaking, covering his hand. Looking down, the seat had a hand-print of solid darkness on it. The paint which had concealed the fact that it was made of the same materials as the tunnel walls had come away in his hands.

Shinji screamed, and backed away from the chair, looking above it through to the window. He bumped, moving backwards, into the other side of the carriage, falling down into the stone-hard seat. There was the crack of aged paint when he recoiled back up.

The train had stopped moving. The beat that had thrummed through his head and linked to his heart was gone. And that terrible solidified void, the figment of his nightmares, was right up against the glass. And it was inside the glass, too, because there was only a thin layer of paint between him and that utter darkness. He froze, the only noise the thud of his heat; the only light the crimson glow of the numbers at each end of the carriage.

_I have to get out of here!_ he screamed within the confines of his own mind. Or did he say it out loud? He wasn't sure. He wasn't sure if there was a difference.

The red light seemed to be fading, leaving him alone in the terrible darkness. Operating on instinct, he darted the other way, towards the '25'. The light had faded as he ran towards the '26', he realised belatedly; perhaps the light in the world would return if he went backwards.

The door opened and he fell through it.

There was no carriage in front of him. Shinji let out a half-moan, half-sob, and rolled over onto his back.

There was no train door behind him. There was no train behind him.

Perhaps there had never been. Perhaps the train had never been anything more than a shadow, cast by these insane night-black hallways. A thin veneer of paint, a lie, that sealed him off from the horrific nature of reality and kept him safe.

In front of him, an endless corridor. He did not know how he knew that in the dark, the last vestiges of light gone with the vanished vehicle, but the way the air moved conveyed the immensity of aeons, where time and distance became one. Where time and distance became meaningless.

Behind him, the same.

Shinji screamed them, though no sound escaped, a voiceless call up to the dark ceiling above him. He scrabbled desperately for the light.

The side-light cast its glow around the room, revealing nothing odder than his bedroom.

Hyperventilating, breath coming out in sob-like gasps, Shinji ran his hands over his nightmare-sweat slick face, the cooled arcology-night air chill against the moisture.

_Not again._

The PsychEvals and the counselling weren't making this go away any faster. Too many times, he had run down that carriage, only ever able to escape from the dream when he was stuck in those black hallways. And in the dreams, he was never able to remember that he'd been here before. Though at the time the terror was fresh, when he awoke, he could see that he had made the same decisions, run the same way. A program, fed the same cues, reacting in the same way.

The world seemed so thin, after what he'd seen. That terrible rip in space after... whatever had happened with the last Herald. The hallways were so much like the swirling chaos he had seen, codified and reborn as architecture.

Slowly, he got out of bed, legs shaky, and went for the main light switch. He wouldn't be able to sleep again after that, and he was not inclined to. More light was better. It kept the darkness away.

Outside his room, the hallway was dark, shadows filling every corner and crawling up the walls.

He swallowed hard, and closed the door, returning to bed.

And so it was that Shinji Ikari was sitting upright in his bed, the light beside and above him keeping the paint-thin layer of mundane reality safe from the darkness which lurked beyond the door, which cast the world as its shadow, when he heard sobbing. A woman was crying elsewhere in the house, the burble muted by distance but still audible in the pre-'dawn' silence.

He could have gone to see what was making the noise. But that would have involved facing the shadows that lurked outside his room, and he would not... could not do that. In such a place, the paper-thin walls would have torn entirely.

All the boy could do was hug his knees, and stare, his bloodshot eyes unfocussed, as fatigue coursed through his brain.

_I want to sleep. I don't want to sleep._

I want the nightmares to stop.

~'/|\'~

Days passed. The nightmares came again and again.

And during the hours of light, it had been an intensely exhausting few days, which was something Shinji had been grateful for. When he was tired, the dreams of the dark hallways came less frequently, allowing him several hours before he woke, screaming silently.

The most recent series of checks under the watchful eyes of Doctor Akagi had included full synchronisation tests in those dummy bodies, floating down in the tank. It seemed that something was happening to the real Evangelions; the entire area was sealed off and when he had asked Misato what was going on, he had only received the somewhat cryptic reply "Refits and repairs."

Asuka had been a lot more irritable about the refusal to explain what they were doing to her Unit 02, and especially the fact that they had to use the dummy bodies for the tests, but the new cold determination had reasserted itself, and she had forced herself (and him with her) further into the training. And although this had provided a noticeable improvement to their cooperation scores, which Doctor Akagi had noted and praised them both on, this had only left him more tired. After all, what people had not taken into account (certainly not Asuka) was that she had been training, put through a militaristic fitness regime, since she was very young, and thus could compete with almost any athlete her age. Generally, her physique was nearly the peak of what the body of a teenaged female could support while remaining healthy.

By contrast, Shinji was a normal arcology dweller, with no special interest in sports. This disparity in things like stamina, muscle tone and endurance was taking its toll.

Doctor Akagi had noted this, and told them that they could lower the intensity of the training, allowing them back to school, where, incidentally, a large amount of school work had accumulated, awaiting their return.

On the plus side, nothing important ever happened in Assembly, so he could just catch a few minutes rest. And this room was properly lit, so he didn't have to worry.

Shinji Ikari closed his eyes and went to sleep, head tilting forwards.

He was woken up by a dig in the gut.

"Whaa..." he mumbled, in Japanese. "Ow! Stop it, 'suka!"

Toja's face filled his field of vision, quickly followed by a brief moment of embarrassment.

The Nazzadi boy squinted at him. "What was that?"

"Nothing," Shinji replied, trying to control the redness in his face.

"It didn't look like nothing. Why are you blushing like that?" He leant over towards Ken. "Look at Shinji. Isn't he blushing?"

The other boy nodded his assent. It appeared, that, yes, from empirical evidence, Shinji was experienced enhanced vascular flow to his face.

"What did he say?"

The bespectacled boy shrugged. "Dunno. I didn't hear him properly. It certainly wasn't post-Reformation English, though. Sounded like Japanese, but I didn't hear enough to get it."

Shinji glanced at the other human. "You know Japanese?" he asked, genuinely interested. "People mostly gave up on learning other languages when the Reformation happened. Well, that and the NEG using English."

Ken shrugged. "I know some. Enough to watch the old shows." He paused. "Some of their predictions were actually pretty accurate, you know." He noticed the way that Toja was directing a funny look at him. "Okay, and maybe I don't like the voices that they use for the dubs. Especially since they're often going off the pre-Reformation dubs for the translations, rather than the originals, and that means that errors creep in all the time, and of course you can't forget..."

People were generally sidling away from the rant, including both Shinji and Toja, although the discussion did attract a few people, including two of the languages teachers.

"So, what did I miss?" he asked, once they had left Ken behind.

The red-eyed boy shrugged. "Not much. The proper announcement of the games options for next term and the groups..." and then he groaned, as recollection struck him. "I'm dead. I'm dead. There's no way I'm going to live to see Christmas."

"Any reason for your death?" asked Shinji, "And can I have your stuff if you do die?"

"Martial Arts is unisex, unlike most of the other sports. The _charming_," he replied, voice heavy with pessimism, "Red Devil is going to slaughter me. She's an evil-minded bitch, but she's very, very fit... and in both senses of the word. I'm a basketball player," he added, spreading his hands wide. "I'm built for throwing a ball into a net high above me. Not for getting all my blood punched out."

"I'm not sure that's physically possible," said Shinji, squinting even as he smiled faintly. "I mean, wouldn't it start clotting after you died from the impacts."

"Who said she'd stop punching after I died?" said Toja, morbidly.

The human shook his head. "Oh well. I think I should just take out an insurance policy on your life. Easy money." He paused, considering what he'd said. "She's not actually as bad as you seem to make her. She's not nice, but she's not pure evil." Shinji reconsidered. "Well, maybe for you. But it was your fault, aggravating her so much."

Toja's red eyes narrowed. "Easy for you to say. You're just suffering Stockholm Syndrome from living with her. She _scares me_."

Shinji raised an eyebrow at the feeling in the other boy's voice. "Really." There wasn't much that you could say to such a thing, but he still made the attempt. "Um... are you sure that it isn't just girls that scare you. I mean, Hikary scares you..."

"Hikary is scary, but not in the same way..." objected Toja.

"Shush. You'll ruin my point." He cleared his throat. "Hikary scares you, Rei scares you..."

"Rei is also scary, in yet another way," the Nazzadi interjected again.

"... Asuka scares you; are you sure that your problem isn't with women?" finished Shinji, desperate to get the joke out. He steepled his fingers, and gazed at Toja over the top of them.

"Don't be an idiot," the other boy sighed. "Stop that."

"Perhaps I should subject you to ze psychoanalysis, yes?" he continued, in an abysmal German accent. Shinji snorted. "Of course, that's not how psychiatry works at all. I should know," he added, a hint of bitterness sinking in. "Oh, well."

There was a pause.

"What were we talking about before?"

"I dunno," said Toja.

Shinji shrugged. "Come on, we'd better hurry, or we'll be late for Modern Society. I'm sure it wasn't that important."

~'/|\'~

"I can't believe the Academy organises half-term trips for everyone!" gushed Asuka, sitting at the lunch table.

The morning had passed in a few moments, seemingly. It wasn't as if the work she had missed in the time off for the special training was especially hard, given that it was designed for teenagers

"You've got to tell me everything," she continued. "It's vitally important!"

"Well, you know. We have yearly trips where we go meet people from other Academies on trips and mix with people from other States and Regions. The real purpose of the Academies is to build the next generation of leaders and scientists; that's one of the PR claims." Hikary looked down at her hands, resting on her lap. "Those complaints about the Academies producing elitist circles of friends who stay connected after they leave are founded in reality, after all."

Asuka smirked. "Good. That's the way it should be, after all." She paused. "You seem less certain about it, though," she said to the other girl.

"I don't necessarily approve of all the results," the Class Representative said, picking her words carefully. "After all, all of us in this class have been together since when we started here... well, apart from you and Shinji. They don't seem to mix up the groups much." She paused. "Actually, no, that's wrong. Ruala and Takumi transferred from other Academies." She drummed her fingers. "Berlin-2 and Tokyo-3, if I recall correctly." She shook her head. "The point is, the Academies are pretty good with the bursaries and scholarships, but they're still weighted towards... well, especially towards the children of Foundation employees."

"That's not necessarily a coincidence," Asuka argued. "The Foundation is pretty heavily meritocratic."

Hikary nodded. "It's true. Nevertheless, it does select for certain types of people, from certain backgrounds, from the population as a whole. My father made me read some studies on it; She laughed. "I don't think that he wants me growing up like some of the _other people_ here," she added in a darker tone. The xenomix laughed again. "Of course, the influence might already be too great. We're two teenage girls, discussing the social effects of the Ashcroft Academies rather than doing what films and TV wants us to do."

Asuka laughed, too. "Right. So, quickly, tell me more about these trips."

"You don't know? I thought it was standard in all the Academies."

"I... I didn't actually go to an Academy before now," Asuka confessed. "The private tutors were Ashcroft-trained, of course, and after that so were most of the lecturers, but I haven't actually been in mainstream... well, sort of mainstream... well, highly-selective-group education before."

Hikary's eyes widened in shock. "Really? That's... unusual."

Asuka nodded. "Yep."

"It's just that... well, it's normally illegal to homeschool people. The only people who'd want to teach people and avoid the state curriculum are members of dangerous cults." Hikary paused, a faint reddish blush appearing on her grey cheeks. "No offence meant, of course."

The red-headed girl shrugged. "None taken. Well, it was unusual. They felt that normal school would interfere with my training too much." She paused. "But you aren't telling me about the trips!" she added, a faint whine entering her voice.

"Oh, right, sorry," she replied, taking a mouthful of food. It all made sense, of course, but there were little holes that drew her attention. Hikary knew that Rei had been at the Academy as long as she had, in mainstream education, at least physically. Much as it pained her, Rei was someone whose mental processes she had not been able to understand at all, and that was unusual. Likewise, from conversations she had had with Shinji, he had also been in Toyko-3 Academy, although not in the exchange group, so she hadn't met him before.

_Why did they decide to tutor Asuka?_

She swallowed. "Right. Each class is grouped with a number of other ones with other Academies. Our class specifically is grouped with four other ones. One in Berlin-2, in Paris-2, in Chicago-2, and Toyko-3." She smiled. "We were really lucky with that. Most classes are only paired with ones in the same Region. That means that we get the best trips."

Asuka grinned widely. "Awesome. Have you been to this place before? What's it like?"

"The Splugen Falls?"

"_Splügen_," interjected Asuka, correcting her pronunciation. "It has the umlaut over the 'u'."

"Okay. The Splügen Falls." She looked to Asuka, who nodded. "Right. Well, it's in Southern Europe, in the Swiss State. They've basically gone and built an entire artificial reef in an artificial lake, complete with natural wildlife. It's really impressive. There's diving at the reef, boating, swimming, and because it's in the Alps, there's also skiing nearby. And it's one of the few places in the world where you can see an entire reef in safety."

"Oh. That is _nice_," said Asuka slowly. Perhaps the fact that they were making her attend school, even though she already had her degree, wasn't that bad. Or, at the very least, it came with some impressive fringe benefits.

Another girl, a Nazzadi with prominent facial markings and dyed white hair, passing by carrying a tray of food paused. "You're talking about the exchange-thing, aren't you," she said, leaning over.

Asuka watched Hikary straighten up slightly, her face becoming slightly mask-like and authoritarian. "Oh, hello. Taly. Yes, we were."

"Yeah, Asuka. Don't think it's some freebie they let us do," said Taly, a cynical tone in her voice. "Sure, they pay for the trip, but for the rest of the year, they have us giving our Thursday afternoons _and_ Saturday mornings in volunteer work." She paused. "Can you believe that! Saturday mornings! I could understand Thursday, but that's just unfair!"

"It is not unfair," retorted Hikary. "It's an important, assessed part of the ACIETs. It counts towards both the Social Awareness and Socialisation modules."

"Sure," counted Taly. "As you say, Class Rep." Her voice was heavy with sarcasm. "Well, I wouldn't want to _interrupt your meal_, so I'll be off." She turned to leave.

Only Asuka heard her parting comment over the noise of the dining hall. "Just as expected from the daughter of the man on the Education Board."

She shook her head.

"That was... hostile."

Hikary sighed. "Oh, I know why that Nazzadist," the term was said with a surprising amount of venom, "is like she is. Her father remarried a dirty unclean human house ape, if you would believe it," the xenomix said, with mock horror, "and she's being raised by Traditionalist grandparents. Doesn't mean that she's any less aggravating."

Asuka leaned back. This was a side to the authoritarian _amlati_ she hadn't seen before. "You don't like Traditionalists?" she asked, slightly tentatively.

"My dad's parents disowned him when he married my mother," Hikary said, coldly. "The first time I saw them, they were trying to persuade him to raise us in the 'Traditional ways'," the venom returning, "as proper Nazzadi." She took a vicious mouth full of drink. "Right after the accident."

"Accident," the redhead echoed, curious. "What happened?"

Hikary shook her head. "Oh, yes. You wouldn't know. I keep on forgetting that you haven't been here all along." Her features twisted into a smile. "See what I mentioned earlier about elitist circles of friends? Anyway," she said, her voice growing softer, "back when I was eight... let me start again." She looked down, folding both hands on her lap, then looked up again. "My mother was a Foundation scientist. It's how she met my father; he's in the social sciences side of things and she was a parapsychologist. There was some kind of accident with hazardous materials; it took out an entire facility." The xenomix gazed straight into Asuka's eyes. "Quite a lot of us here lost family in that accident; it was a major research facility. That's the real meaning of the phrase "Ashcroft Children", at least in practice." She paused. "Anyway what I can really remember about it was my grandparents showing up for the first time, at the memorial service. They made Dad cry in front of us. I think you can understand if I don't like the Traditionalists."

There was a prolonged moment of silence, as a sudden wave of empathy flooded through Asuka. "I understand, and... well, I'm sorry," she said gently.

The xenomix shook her head. "I'm sorry for pouring it all like that. It's just that Taly really irritates me, but as Class Representative I can't let it show. With that lot, I've been Representative so long that sometimes I think they view me as some kind of pseudo-teacher commander person, a figure of authority, not a classmate." She smiled weakly. "It's nice to have someone to let it all out on... not that I intend to just complain about other people to you," she added quickly, putting on a mask of happiness. "Let's talk about something less depressing, shall we?"

~'/|\'~

Mary Anderson was barely functional by the time that she stumbled from the ArcTransit stop to her apartment. What she needed right now was sleep. She flexed her back muscles. Of course, she couldn't have that right now, as her system still hadn't broken down the most recent dose of Extended Operation Enhancement, but that would be coming at some point in the not too distant future. So, maybe a bath first. And food. Then sleep.

The point was, what she did not, in any way, need was another phone call cancelling the leave they had given her unit. With luck, there wouldn't be one, since they had managed to cycle in enough agents from the Office of Internal Security from other locations, allowing them to give the chronically overworked local staff a relief. She had four days of paid leave, and then she would be back to her normal job, not handed armour and a rifle and dragged out on overtime to cover the shortage of field agents.

Not that she even got paid for overtime. As a member of the OIS, you worked to the job, not the clock. There were probably other cop film clichés she could throw in, she thought as she stood in the apartment scanning, waiting for the damn ageing machine to confirm with the central server that, yes, she did have a permit to carry that weapon and thus was permitted to enter the building. All in all honesty, though, she was far too tired to think up any.

Maybe when she was back as a functional human being. Well, technically, a functional _amlati_; her mother wouldn't have approved of her thinking of herself like that, but she'd always taken after her father more. It was why she had ended up in this job.

He chain of thought was interrupted by a tall figure bursting out of a door and wrapping its arms around her.

"You're okay? You're okay!" it babbled into her ear, grabbing her in a somewhat-too-tight hug.

"John... John... yes, I'm fine. Now, you can let go of me," she told her boyfriend.

Actually, what he did was shift the hug into a lift, picking her up in his arms. Of course, the fact that she was still wearing her ballistic protection under her jacket, and he was built like a beanpole meant that he staggered, and put her back down rather than drop her. He made it up to her by mashing his lips into hers in a prolonged kiss

"I've missed you so much," he whispered into her ear, after getting his breath back.

She tensed up slightly. This was slightly out of character for him, which put her nerves on edge and triggered certain alarm bells in her Office of Internal Security training. She was almost certainly just paranoid, a side effect (and, indeed, a somewhat desired one) from operating on EOE for too long, but she had to be careful. "You seem pleased," she said, concealing the suspicion.

He rolled his eyes, as he guided her back through the door to their apartment. "Of course I'm happy. You're alive, well and uninjured. And I haven't seen you in six days, since you were rushed out in the middle of the night. The last I heard from you was three days ago, in a rushed phonecall." He paused. "I was worried about you," he admitted, which was a rare enough thing for him to say out loud. He preferred not to worry about things that he couldn't change; it was a way of coping.

Agent Anderson... no, she reminded herself, Mary; she was off duty now, relaxed. It made sense, and he hadn't been replaced by something while she was gone; a certain fear that haunted her nightmares. She'd forgotten exactly how long she'd been away; the days of consciousness had blurred into one long mix of scenes of blood mixed with long waits.

The inhibition of the formation of long term memories was also a design feature of Extended Operations Enhancement. It was possible to counteract it, but most of the time it was better for the agents to forget the specifics, instead letting it fade into depersonalised, dream-like memories.

"Oh, right. Sorry. I forgot. I thought I'd sent you a message more recently...did I? I can't remember?" She shook her head, then smiled weakly. "So... how have you been?"

John's eyes widened. "How have I been? How have I been? When you're the one who..." He paused, took a deep breath, and squeezed his eyes shut. "Sorry. I forgot."

This was the immovable obstruction in their relationship; she could not tell him anything about what she did. As an agent of the OIS, even where she was when she was on duty was classified. In fact, legally (a legacy of the rather harsh restrictions they were subject to) Agent Anderson and Mary were different people, the former not possessing the full array of human rights nor fully subject to certain laws. It was how the TSEAP was permitted; neither the victims nor the operators were quite human (or NEG-recognised human subspecies). Against the insanity of the foes of the NEG, the OIS had introduced its own subtle madnesses to keep people sane.

She reached up, patting his head. "It's okay. You can make it up by making me some proper food and then running a bath. Seriously. I haven't properly slept in," she mentally totted it up, and realised that it came to almost seventy hours, "far too long, nor eaten proper solid food. Protein slash fibre bars and nutrient fluid just aren't the same." She paused. "And why are you wearing those silly green AR glasses?" she asked.

John flushed slightly. "I was... playing a game when I got the alert from the apartment security that you'd got back."

The apparent reason for the embarrassment was revealed when one look in the apartment showed that he had let it return to the state his room had been during university.

He raised one finger. "Just wait there," he said quickly, as he darted around the room, picking up piles of old-fashioned paper books and datapads from the seating and moving them to an already perilously overloaded table.

"You made all that mess in less than a week?" Mary asked, one eyebrow raised as she sunk into a chair.

Assent was nodded.

"Well, at least there isn't food all over the place," she remarked, stretching out. It felt good to sit down properly.

"I'd have you know, oh fair lady," he replied, stepping through to the kitchen for some hurried cleaning, "that most of these books are work-related."

That statement was a blatant lie. At best, 20% of them were. Books on early twenty-first century history and the formation of the New United Nations lay mixed with science fiction, image documents of saurian anatomy, lists of early memetic developments, and one book on mid-medieval farming techniques.

"You wouldn't believe the amount of spam litigation and requests we've been having to field. Idiots who don't realise that the Freedom of Information Acts doesn't apply to the Foundation as a private company, requests that we reveal all research carried out which requires a RTE Exemption..." he made a disgusted noise, "...really, I wish that people would actually find out what rights they have under the law before trying to use ones they don't have. Or, fair enough, not using the ones they have."

The Office of Internal Security agent said nothing.

"But look at me rambling on." He paused, shaking his head at the petty complaints he had, compared to whatever (though popular culture gave him certain suspicions) she had just been through. "What would you like to eat?" he asked, in a gentler voice. "I'll make you anything you want."

~'/|\'~

The air of the swimming pool was devoid of the scent of chlorine. The micromachine scrubbers in the filtration unit saw to it that such a crude chemical method was entirely superfluous.

_And if something went wrong, and the water ended up filled with germs,_ Shinji thought, as he sat at a table by the side of the pool, _Asuka could always produced enough vitriol to sterilise the entire area._

He smiled faintly.

_Of course, the water wouldn't be fit to swim in after that much sulphuric acid was added to it, but still..._

The reason for this mild annoyance was not, of course, caused by the fact that he had really hideous amounts of work to catch up with, what with the mandatory training taking them away from school as well as the necessary observation period after the last mission. Asuka had, naturally, breezed through hers, and so he was stuck trying to focus by the side of a pool in the Geocity, while she got to play around.

Honestly. He wasn't annoyed about that _at all_.

Of course, his rationality did raise the point that he should be glad that they had cancelled the planned in-Unit training session, thus actually giving him an opportunity to do this catching up, but, somehow, it was worse to be stuck working when someone else was getting to play within visual range, than be both forced to work. The rationality was promptly ignored. After all, the rest of the class was having to do their Social Responsibility stuff, at the hospital or at one of the feeder schools, Wade Primary, and he was doing catch-up work. Why should she get to play around?

"What're you doing?"

Shinji sighed, and looked up Asuka... and then up a bit further, actually focussing on her face. "Work."

Asuka looked down at the bot, with a sudden wave of exasperation. "Yes," she said. She took a deep breath, noting the way his eyes flicked down to her chest with a mixture of irritation and pleasure. "I know that. Just like you're doing last time I asked. I more asking when you were going to be finished. I'm bored with just doing lengths on my own."

Shinji felt a slight wave of happiness, mingling with the annoyance that she was interrupting him. At least she showed signs of finding his presence tolerable. The training did seem to have improved things.

Outwardly, he shrugged. "No clue. I'm stuck on this really difficult bit of calculus, so it looks like it'll be while, and I've got the Modern History bit to do, too."

"Let's see, then," replied Asuka, leaning across him without waiting for a reply to grab the touchscreen.

_I might have protested, but she compensated twice over,_ he thought, smirking.

There was a small snort of laughter. "This is difficult?" Asuka said, trying (not very hard) to restrain her giggles. "Awww," she added, ruffling his hair in an insulting manner.

"Hey, it is hard!" he said, indignantly.

"Listen to the person with the degree when they tell you that, yes, it is easy. In fact, it's trivial," was the response that he got.

"Well, it's not when you missed most of the lessons when they explained it, you haven't been able to sleep properly, and someone keeps on jumping in the pool and generally distracting you," he snapped back.

All that outburst achieved was another "Awwwww," as Asuka gave up any pretence of concealing her laughter, and threw back her head.

Shinji stared up at her with irritation which was, under the heat from her patronisation, being transmuted into anger, before he caught a glance of himself staring at her in the mirrors on the other side of the room.

For no reason, it seemed hilarious. Suddenly, it was very hard to keep a straight face. And keeping a straight face was necessary to maintain his moral high ground.

A snort of laughter escaped, which was shortly followed by another.

"Oh dear," Asuka said, as they calmed down from the sudden hysteria. "By the way, I did this page for you," she added, as she handed him back the touchpad.

Shinji squinted at her. "How... how did you do that in that time, when you spent most of it laughing? Just... just how?"

Asuka rolled her eyes; shaking her head even as she still smiled. "Which part of 'trivial' don't you understand?"

"Well... um. Thanks. I think," replied Shinji. He noticed a movement behind the red-haired girl. "Uh... I think, yes, Rei's finally got back from whatever she was doing. If you want to race someone, you can race her." He paused. "From what I've heard from others, she's meant to be really good."

Asuka turned to look over where Shinji was staring, and her eyes widened in shock.

"She's wearing... is she? Yes, I think she is. She's wearing a white swimming costume." She paused. "That looks really bad on her. Like some anatomyless doll." Asuka turned back to stare at Shinji, "Seriously. It's like I chose to wander around in a flesh coloured swimsuit. What would you think of that?" She paused. "Don't answer that," she added. "Pervert."

Shinji shrugged. "Maybe she just likes white."

Asuka made a disgusted noise. "Oh, you're clueless. And male, but I repeat myself. Look, you don't do that kind of thing. She'd look good in black, or maybe blue." She waved a hand. "Oh, never mind. There's no use in explaining this to you. I only wonder if she's doing this because she's strange, or because of the Nazzadi side of her family?"

"You're still ignoring that she might just like white," Shinji remarked.

"Translation: 'You Just Don't Get It'."

The boy frowned. "Wait, why?"

"What are you, stupid? You're just digging yourself into a deeper hole." Asuka flicked her hair. "It doesn't matter if that's what she likes, it just looks wrong. Really indecent."

Shinji explicitly did not comment on her seeming preference for clothes of a Nazzadi cut.

"Whatever. It's just not the same." And with that said, Asuka went off to challenge Rei to a swimming race. Shinji sighed, and put the touchpad back on the table, wiping off the wet fingerprints that the red-haired girl had left on it.

_All in all, I probably did benefit from her coming over. I don't think that I could have got all the work she did done like that. At least that puts me ahea..._

"Shinji!" called Asuka, from the other side of the hall, her voice loud over the quite sound of running water and near negligible hum of ambient machinery. "You're going to judge the race. Four lengths, diving start. You owe me for the help."

He glanced over. Asuka was waving at him, to get his attention, while Rei just gazed, her face perfectly blank, at the water.

Shinji sighed. It would probably be advisable to find a quiet place to actually work, given that he had a sudden prescience that this was going to happen increasingly frequently if he stayed.

"Okay," he called out, deliberately inserting weariness into his voice to make it clear that he was trying to work (and, incidentally, still wasn't getting enough sleep). "Take your positions..."

He had to admit, though, that the actual race was quite interesting. And not merely because it featured two rather attractive girls; one in a tight swimming costume, and the other in a bikini. Honestly.

Asuka was a rather good swimmer, quite apart from the fact that she was near the peak of fitness that the body of a sixteen-year old girl could support. She had obviously practised properly, although there were some anomalies in her style from the fact that the training had often been in full clothing, and sometimes in armour. Nevertheless, she was good

She lost by almost three-quarters of a length to Rei. The other girl was just at home in the water in a way that Asuka was not; her technique mechanically perfect as she cut through the water like a near invisible knife. The pattern of stroke after stroke remained unbroken for each length, head only emerging from the water when she turned at each end.

It was amazing. It was also, all in all, somewhat scary in its efficiency. And somewhat scary, full stop.

A perfect reflection of Rei, then.

Asuka was somewhat less calm about the result when she reached the end.

"How... wh...how did you do... that?" she asked, panting from the exertion, with undercurrents of both annoyance and amazement in her tone.

Rei gazed at her, not even out of breath, for a few seconds too long.

"I like swimming," she finally said.

This was deemed to be singularly unhelpful by the red-headed girl, who promptly challenged her to a rematch. Shinji slipped away, to continue striving against the Leviathan-Who-Is-Called-Homework in a futile attempt to slay it, in a quieter room.

~'/|\'~

Representative Ikari was in a fairly bad mood, Ritsuko could tell, when she entered his vast office, called from her lab by his sudden summons. His motions had the slight rigidity and efficiency of motion that she knew displayed the annoyance which was not shown on his face. He had been standing in the middle of the room when she arrived, a vast array of holographic markings projected on the floor which she, no trivial sorceress herself, could barely guess at the functions of. The circles, the flowing runes thrown up by the underfloor holoemittors; they spoke of complexities of applied arcane theory (called colloquially "sorcery") which she did not grasp.

Fortunately, as the warning light outside his door had been off, Gendo had merely been studying the pattern, not using it. Even small children were taught from a very young age of the dangers of disturbing a sorcerer.

With a wave of his gloved hand, he deactivated the pinkish-red marks which had scarred the floor, returning it to its normal white, and turned to face her fully.

_When did he start wearing gloves?_ she thought to herself. _The skin transplant after the accident with Unit 00 looked like it had taken properly. Has his body started rejecting the graft?_

"Doctor Akagi," he said, his voice not displaying any of the emotion that she was sure lay below, "you are to cease the synchronisation trials immediately. The initial success has been noted; however, you are not to experiment any further in that direction."

She recoiled slightly. "But... G.... Representative. We've been getting noted successes with the trial. Coordinated reaction time is down 41%, after only such a short period. Against the Heralds, and with what we are about to do, such an advantage might be vital."

Gendo pushed his Augmented Reality glasses back up his nose, preventing their slide. "The ORACLE has produced multiple results that predict that major mental contamination will occur if the synchronisation is permitted to continue. Such a result would not only produce a catastrophic breakdown in the interactions with both the EFCS Type 1 and Type 2 as the noetic waveforms became superposed, but in addition the risk of a further contamination from the Lilitu source conveyed by either the Project-P subjects or the Third Infant is too great." He paused. "Or, indeed, the First Infant could also be a Lilitu vector."

Ritsuko flushed red, then nodded. "I was aware of the potential risks at the start of the cycle. However, I judged, and the Deputy Representative agreed, that the paired combat efficiency..."

"We do not have the candidates to spare," interrupted Gendo, his eyes narrowing by an almost immeasurable fraction. "We already are forced to share future candidates with Project-P, and these two are the only two available pilots not currently at risk from the Lilitu entity." He paused, tilting his head to the side. "I would prefer to keep it that way."

_But is it that,_ thought Ritsuko, _or might some parental, human feeling be leaking in? Would you really care if you did not have links to both the subjects?_

And, sadly, the evidence showed that human feelings were detrimental to the cause of Humanity. _At what point does the sacrifice of many lesser ideals cripple the good of the greater concept._ That was always the question.

Ritsuko clamped down on her emotions and nodded her head. "Yes, Representative," she said somewhat stiffly. "The synchronisation experiments will cease immediately."

"See that they do," was the answer. "You are excused, Doctor Akagi."

The woman turned around and marched out, not looking back.

_The idiot,_ Gendo thought. _Except it isn't even that. The scientific and technical staff were selected for both their brilliance and myopia. I can hardly complain that I am surrounded by short-sighted fools, even when they do things like that._

Well, that and the fact that such a complaint would be cliché. And I will not fall into the old patterns, because there are others who can observe patterns and predict where they lead.

But that is irrelevant. Such complete blindness for the effects such research on minds that are, at most, afflicted with 1st stage Aeon War Syndrome, shows that she is solidly 3rd stage or later.

He blinked twice.

_I will see to it that her dosage is upped, without her knowledge. I need her functional for what is about to come._

At least the social triggers still work. By persuading the Board to order the removal of the Evangelion armour "For Study", I forced her to go to the Engel Project.

Their assets will be needed later, so I need a tolerable relationship between the teams.

With a wave of his hand, there was a click and a soft humming in the air, as the holoprojectors recreated the runes and circles. He would derive the meaning of these arcane secrets far beyond the feeble knowledge of humanity, force them into understanding so that everything would go as planned, if it killed him. It had a fair chance of doing so.

_And some things that will be needed... I can only trust myself to do. Despite the pain. For you, Yui._

~'/|\'~

"Wait, what! What do you _mean_ I can't _go_ on the trip?!"

The shout would have echoed around Misato's apartment had it not been for the specially designed acoustics. As it was, there was a muffled squawk from the bathroom, as Pen-Pen momentarily panicked, atavistic instincts overriding the fledgling consciousness before he could reassert himself.

Misato took another sip of beer, before nodding. "Yep."

Asuka pursed her lips and lowered her voice, realising that shouting at both her superior officer and the Director of Operations for Project Evangelion was perhaps not the wisest of moves. "Why not?" she asked, forced politeness in her voice.

"Because as a commissioned officer of the New Earth Government, you haven't submitted a form to apply for leave," replied the Major, heartlessly. "If I were to let you go, I'd be guilty of aiding you in deserting your station."

The girl's eyes narrowed. "All right. I'll go through the procedures, then."

Shinji poked his head in through the door to the kitchen, the smell of cooking wafting through with him. Asuka sniffed at the air. Whatever he was cooking, it smelt good.

Misato, of course, smelt nothing.

"Does that mean that I can still go on the trip?" he asked, hope in his voice.

Misato shook her head. "I'm afraid not," her smile fading for a second, before returning, full force, as she turned her gaze back to Asuka. "And I probably wouldn't waste time filling out the forms," the Major added. "I have this feeling that the officer who forbade any leave for Project Evangelion staff for non-critical causes won't be sympathetic, and will probably reject it out of hand."

The redhead frowned. This wasn't right. She was actually trying to associate with people her own age since Kaji had told her to, even though most of them were idiots. And now they were going to stop her from going on a trip, after they'd put her through some very basic remedial training for days on end, with the wimp doing the cooking.

Also, she'd miss the reef. That was important.

"Well, who is the officer, then?" she asked. "Maybe I can..." and then her brain managed to overcome her outrage. Asuka sighed. "It's you, isn't it, Misato," she said in a defeated tone, glancing the black-haired woman and her cat-like grin.

Misato grinned, and nodded. "Yes."

The younger woman groaned. "You're taking far too much pleasure from this for a professional military officer," she muttered under her breath, glaring at the black-haired woman.

"Asuka, I've stared down the gullet of a Bhole," Misato replied, her expression shifting to a slightly patronising smile. "I doubt there is a girl on the planet who could terrify me just with a glance. And..." she added, taking another swig from the can in front of her, "...though my sense of smell may be gone, I still have very good hearing."

Asuka paused. Well, if that was the way they were going to play it...

"Well, what about Shinji?" she retorted, surprising both the titular individual in the kitchen and Misato. "I don't think it's fair that he doesn't get to go. I mean, I chose to become the youngest commissioned officer in the NEGA," a faint smiled appeared on her face, as the pride battled with her pre-existing irritation, "while he's just basically a conscript."

It made sense to attack at that point. That was the charge that they were very vulnerable towards; the New Earth Government was proud that its armed forces remained all-volunteer, and conscription of the underage was a real threat towards its view of itself.

Of course, the fact was that the only reason that they didn't use conscription was that the limited production of D-Engines put a hard cap on the number of vehicles and suits of powered armour they could deploy in the field. In this age of high-energy weapons and walking battle armour, the humble infantryman was of very limited use. Doctrinally, powered armour was used in roles where infantrymen would have been used in the past; the actual groundpounders were mostly relegated to static positions where they could be issued with heavy weapons, in engineering units, and inside arcologies, where the tight confines put a limit on the deployment of heavy vehicles. But that was not a fact made commonly known to the public.

Misato frowned. "What are you doing, Asuka?" she asked suspiciously. "And he isn't a conscript,as he isn't a member of the military."

Asuka nodded her head cynically. "_Sure_. That would explain why a mere _Test Pilot_," adding a vicious twist to the words, "is the one who has been deployed the most of all the Evangelion pilots, while there is also one who actually has military training who has been deployed less," she said, throwing Misato's previous comments back in her face.

The older woman reddened slightly. "This isn't about you, Asuka..."

"Oh, I'm not doing this for myself," she replied, smiling sweetly. "Look at it another way. He's been deployed against every single Herald that we've encountered. He deserves a rest. Frankly," she added, "he deserves a break, where he doesn't have to worry about things."

Asuka could see the guilt in the other woman's face. Good. She had deliberately focussed on that, so that she could... why was she doing this? It was complicated, she admitted to herself. Part of the reason, she had to admit to herself, was that the training had given her a bit more empathy for Shinji. Not sympathy, she hastened to add mentally, because she could still see that he was a passive-aggressive annoyance who seemed to enjoy getting into arguments with her, but she could at least see why he was like that.

Although she didn't have to like it.

There was also pity mixed in with it, too. She'd seen him try to wear himself out so that he could sleep with the lights on; sitting there, staring at the darkness. There was that distant look that he sometimes got since the... since whatever had happened with the most recent Herald, where he had looked into the Zone. Had something looked back, or was it something less personal; something that left him with the feeling he had mentioned twice that the world, the whole universe was just the shadow of some higher dimensional object? Either way, he didn't deserve it. He was just some random kid, who somehow seemed a lot younger than she was, stuck in a role that he didn't want and wasn't properly prepared for. He had done very well, and (though she was loathe to admit it), was improving, but, really, they should be getting properly prepared people, like her, to be doing this, not some scared teenager.

_And, well, if a Herald does happen to attack while he's away, well, that would just mean that I would get to show them all what I can do on my own. And since I'm a lot better as a pilot than Rei, I will be the one who gets the next kill. Not Shinji. Not Rei. Not the military. Me._

Really, I'm doing him a favour. I'm not doing it just _to get rid of him for a while._

Not entirely, at least.

Shinji, his head poking through the door, flushed slightly, smiling in an embarrassed way.

_I didn't think she was that nice. Maybe that training worked better than it seemed at the time._

Misato was slightly suspicious about the sudden attitude change, but that didn't change what she was about to say.

"Well, I can understand where you're coming from, and even agree with you," she began, "but it's not that easy. If it makes it any easier, we're not just doing this out of some twisted desire to make your lives miserable." The laugh that followed was bitter. "The universe seems to do enough of that, for us as a species." She shook her head, the vitriol in her eyes fading. "Shinji, how are you doing with dinner? Are you in the middle of anything?"

The boy shook his head. "I've just put it in the oven."

Misato nodded. "Come in, then. Sit down. At the table," she added. She waited until he was fully seated, then tucked her hands onto her lap, clearing her throat. "What I am about to tell you is classified as Code SANDALPHON... that's one of the highest security codes," she added as an aside to Shinji, who was staring blankly at the mention; Asuka was familiar with the security code system. "I could describe all the punishments you'd be letting yourself in for if you broke the security and revealed this information, but we wouldn't want the food to get burnt," she said, wryly.

There wasn't any laughter at the weak joke. Misato shook her head, and took a swig of drink.

"Let me explain to you about Operation CATO..."

~'/|\'~

This room could have been a twin all so many rooms, buried deep in the London Geocity; cold, sterile and white, with all the sharp edges rounded off, leaving not one right angle, and lit to prevent any shadows from forming.

Not that this was surprising, of course. In the Aeon War, it was necessary to prevent certain threats from gaining intrusion to sensitive areas. This style was the product of scouring countless arcane grimoires and massive consultations between arcanoengineers, sorcerers, architects, and scholars of the occult, with the occasional conventional engineer thrown in to ensure that the room could actually be built under the limiting constraints of reality.

What it resembled, more than anything, was a hospital morgue. Dark greenish-black boxes hung from the walls, their shapes disturbingly reminiscent, to a morbid mind, of coffins. On each one was tagged a complex serial number; an entirely superfluous feature when the multiple levels of tagged ID were taken into account. But it would not do to lose one of these containers.

On each, emblazoned across the top in white, was a single Roman numeral.

**VII**

A blond woman gazed out over the room, from a viewing window.

"Ah, what was the saying?" she said softly, to herself. "That is not dead which can forever lie. And with many strange aeons even death can die? Perhaps." She shrugged. "But are they alive, or are they dead? They are not sapient. They are not even sentient. They fulfil all the criteria of the dead, except, for, perhaps, the most important one. But they will live properly soon."

She became aware that she was talking to herself. The woman closed her mouth. One of her assistants was looking at her with mild concern in his brown eyes.

_Look around the room_, she thought, gazing blankly back at the man. _No Nazzadi, and all the xenomixes take after their terrestrial side, culturally. Why do they protest (or would they protest, if we let them know) so much to what we do?_

Well, obviously, I know why _they protest, but I don't see why they can't see how it is necessary._

"Director?"

She shook her head. "Nothing. Just thinking out loud. We will be having the first combat trials soon. It's just that... well," she shrugged, "the Project's finally looking to pay off. It's something that I've sometimes thought wouldn't happen."

The aide nodded his head. "I know, Director." He stood by her side, looking out at the row upon row of stasis pods, their contents within kept fed and watered through intravenous drip until they were activated. "I joined just after the death of your father in that accident..."

_No accident! No accident!_

"... that was a depressing time, let me tell you that." He glanced at the woman. "Sorry."

She shook her head. "I'm fine. It was eight years ago. I've come to terms with it." She laughed, bitterly. "It's not as if it's uncommon if you have relatives with Ashcroft," she added, cocking her head curiously. "Do you have any other family with the Foundation, if you don't mind me asking?"

_It was her! It was her!_

The man shook his head. "None, but my sister's with the Army, stationed up in Canada."

"Ah. The Migou have been threats up there ever since the Fall of Alaska." There was a pause. "Has Colonel Rury from the Army SWD got back to when she wants to do the final inspection?" she said, changing the topic.

The aide straightened up. "No, Director, she has not."

The blonde woman sighed. "When she does, tell her that we will be shipping the units over to the staging ground in three days. Let her decide where she wants to watch the tests."

"Yes, Director." The man made a note on his wrist-mounted PCPU.

"And the Perseus Commander remains stable?"

"Again, yes. Although his LAAM score remains at 100, as it has for the entirety of his adult life," the man continued, an aggrieved tone in his voice, "despite all attempts to lower it, we have no potential harbin... that is, potential warnings of a synchronisation incident." The man paused. "The reports on Sub-Commanders Heracles, Orpheus, and Achilles all indicate that they will be capable of handling the coordination of the Subjects in their groups, as will the back-up candidates, Odysseus and Jason, and their Subjects, using the older Type VIs." He coughed. "As I mentioned in my last report, all three primary candidates have had a noted rise in LAAM scores over the last two years which matches or exceeds the increase in the EMSS scores. Without exception, those candidates have the highest LAAM in their groups, and together, if we exclude the Second Infant, have the three highest LAAMs in the entire candidate pool, including the successful Batch-Type candidates."

"I have read your report, you know," the blond woman said acidly.

"I merely state that the hierarchical model of the command structure means that if a synchronicity incident occurs with any of the Sub-Commanders, the vector could spr..."

"And, again, I am aware of this." She sighed. "I will be in Lab 1-Beth. I am not to be disturbed for the next two hours. Is that clear, Barriso?"

The man nodded. "Perfectly, Director Wade."

The route to Lab 1-Beth was long, deep into the heart of the facility, past many security checkpoints of a level that mere blood checks and skin samples were not enough to gain access. The threat of Blanks, that terrible Migou technique which rewrote a personality in a way which left it exactly the same, bar an irrevocable dedication to the Yuggothian fungoids, was enough that they could not risk letting even a single one through. Especially into the Herkunft facility, the Ashcroft Foundation group dedicated to research into all parapsychic phenomena and thus at the forefront for research into either subverting or replicating the Migou technosorcery.

But no such research went on in Lab 1-Beth. She was the only one who went into this research facility. Micromachines might have scrubbed the area of dirt or dust, but that only left the smell, a burning, metallic scent which spoke of such utter sterility that the place might have been an area of the moon, settled only for this purpose.

It was amusing, barely, she thought idly, that the reason her father was famous in the public eye was because of his work into genetic modification, which had produced the hybrid machine-biological air recycling units used in the offworld colonies.

Of course, the colonies had all been destroyed by the original Nazzadi invasion fleet. They had slagged the lunar facilities from orbit, along with the others. Nazzadi shock troopers, in powered armour, had swarmed from Titan to Ganymede to Mars, taking out the air supplies and leaving the colonies to asphyxiate. The mining facilities in the Asteroid Belt had such atrocities inflicted upon them that every officer involved in the operation who had defected from the original purpose of the Migou-created fleet had been 'disappeared'.

It was only because of the Second Arcanotech War, which later became the Aeon War, that the Nazzadi were as accepted as they were. Billions of lives cannot be forgiven so easily. It might not matter to the younger generations, on either side, but many older people on the human side, who remembered the war, did not forget the black-skinned, red eyed forces slaughtering their way through cities, taking out food, power and water, and leaving the civilians to starve (when they didn't "put them out of their misery" with nerve gas).

The airlock to Lab Beth-1 cycled, and Director Alice Wade of Project Herkunft stepped forwards, towards the object which was the reason that Beth-1 existed.

A pale face stared mindlessly back from the tank of orange liquid.

The Fourth Infant had floated here for eight years, all higher brain functions dead from the synchronicity incident with Subject Lilitu. It only lived because of the orange-red liquid; if the flesh were taken out, the mockery of life it portrayed would finally cease. And it was not merely brain-dead; it was also soul-blasted, a hollow vessel devoid of role of function.

By legal standards, it was dead. Perhaps death would have been a mercy, had the mass of flesh been capable of even the rudiments of thought. It just lay there, the body ageing and maturing despite the fact that its mind was gone; no, destroyed. Burned out and dead.

But that is not dead which can eternal lie. And with strange aeons even death may die.

~'/|\'~


	15. Chapter 12: Blood Dimmed Tides

**Chapter 12**

Blood-Dimmed Tides

~'/|\'~

**3rd of November, 2091**

**13:22**

Raguelle Goldstein sat outside in the chill breeze, on the roof of the building, gazing out to sea. Her scarf was pulled aside from her face, but the rest of her body was swathed in a thick overcoat and gloves, proof against the inclement climate. She chewed idly on a nutrient bar, the reprocessed kelp and fish fairly flavourless, but nevertheless a clear sign of the benevolence of the Holy Ones.

Her left hand sunk down to her stomach, the swelling barely showing. _He_ was out there, she knew, the Holy One who had favoured her not once, not twice, but thrice. For that, she had been truly blessed, for few among such pitiful kind as hers could say that one of the Chosen of Great Dagon had chosen to come back. It was good, after all, as it would ensure that her children by him would have both a strong father and each other, long after they had left their flawed mother behind.

And, truly, what more could a caring parent desire?

Down, from the streets below, she could hear the market, the voices crying out. To an observer, both from the godless New Earth Government as well as an earlier time, it would have sounded strange. The language, or more accurately language_s_, spoken came from all around the globe, as the faithful had flocked to this place to avoid the persecution of the NEG and the genocide of the Migou. The dominant tongue, at least in this region, was a pidgin, linguistically approaching a creole, of post-Reformation English, a northern Brazilian dialect of Portugese, but underlying everything, and the source of what the unholy would have been perplexed by, was the sacred tongue of R'lyehan.

True, the mortals, even though they were of the Elect, were ill-equipped to speak the blessed tongue, their ape-like throats but poorly forcing out the inhuman syllables, warping and twisting them, but those born with the Blood could do better, a faculty which only improved with age. Nevertheless, the hollow, liquid sounds resonated off the walls, in both the shrill chatterings of uplifted apes as well as the guttural barkings of those who had almost become the Chosen, their parentage released to the world.

Her eyes skipped over to the nearest Eye, one of the heavily armoured domes which were speckled along the coastline. As a static defence, they were innately able to pump more power into their colossal lasers than a comparably-sized ship It was impossible to assault this area with ships, because they would be targeted and destroyed, but the Eyes were impregnable to anything lesser. That reminded her. They had another militia training session the day after tomorrow. No-one over the age of 15 was exempt from the militia; even the injured or crippled would be trained for supporting roles. And it may have been a holy duty, but it was also bitterly cold in the Icelandic autumn. Really, she did not need this now. Sighing, Raguelle went back inside.

~'/|\'~

The sea crashed against the coastal wall, long breakers rolling in from the Arctic. The late autumn wind blew too, up the Eyjafjörður Fjord, whistling through the packed tenements of the city of Dagon'uvtu Oraribyrapr, literally, _The Blessing of Highest Dagon_. No building here dated back to before the glorious forces of truth had seized this land from the malevolent aliens who would work against the cause of faith and deny the Great of this planet his domain. No, the fungoid Yuggothians had erased the human habitation which had existed here before, replacing it with the high spires and deep bunkers so beloved of their kind. But the Chosen of Great Cthulhu, servants of Lord Dagon, and those humans who had seen their light had cleansed this island of their alien taint, restoring it to the species which owned this planet, despite the feeble claims of the upstart, unfaithful humans who would deny the elder species their rightful claim. Even the human-scaled buildings which the Loyalist Nazzadi, who had chosen to stay subservient to their creators, and the Blanks, who had been given no such choice through the technosorcery of the Migou, had been torn down. The profane marks of those aliens could not be permitted to stand.

And so now the Chosen had claimed this land for themselves, and permitted those loyal to them, the Elect, to dwell upon it. Iceland had never previously been so densely populated; even at the height of its settlement, before the First Arcanotech War, the population had never exceeded one million human beings. Now, however, sprawling tenements and apartments clustered around the coastal region, and temples reached up to the skies, gazing out to sea. The youthful population, their numbers swelling from a birth rate incomprehensible to those living in the moribund, sterile New Earth Government, clamoured and grew in these environs. Not for them the cold clinical arcologies, under the ever-watching eyes of a godless state that put more faith in machine than flesh and reduced people to decadent cogs in their attempts to keep their childlike populace under their control; no, this was life as humanity was meant to be exist.

Vibrant.

Youthful.

Under the leadership of the Chosen.

Interspaced with the thronging masses of the Elect, and closer to the interior of the mountainous island, the unfaithful were held, their bodies serving the faith. Factories, the menial operations carried out by drugged prisoners, churned out the gifts of industry. The pernicious effects of the nanofactory, corroding the value of work and leaving people weak were minimised. Good solid labour taught these unbelievers true faith, and with time, if they repented their ways, they too could join the coastal cities. It was even easier for the females among the blasphemers, for all that they had to do was bear the children of the Chosen and their sins would be forgiven. And these gifts from Lord Dagon and Lady Hydra only added to the masses which teemed on the island.

Iceland was the possession of the Esoteric Order of Dagon, and they would keep it.

~'/|\'~

Raguelle was greeted with Yhan's smirking face when she stepped back inside.

"Back from your smoke break already? You sure you wouldn't rather spend a little more time?"

She replied, "Oh, funny man. Did it take you all the time I was away to think that up? And I'm sure you know that I was just eating; it's bad for women to smoke."

He stroked his scraggy beard (those with the Blood had problems with facial hair), tilting his head to the side slightly. "I'm going to have to give you a seven for that. Good comic timing, but you ruined it with the health message at the end."

Raguelle nodded. "Thanks. Now, just step aside and I can get back to work before Khonatqa decides to check."

"And we wouldn't want that, would we?" Yhan replied in a deadpan tone. "Why, she'd just love to eat your unBlooded flesh raw." His face broke out into a grin. "Om nom nom!" he added, gesturing as if he were cramming food into his mouth with both hands.

She walked past him without a reply, flicking her head in irritation. Fortunately, she managed to make it back to her desk without any other delays, or being caught by Khonatqa. That woman was a terror; blessed heavily (she would probably be taking to the waters soon, despite only being in her thirties), but not a people-person. There was already a fair amount of office politicking going on to see who would take her position when she did ascend to the ranks of the Chosen.

As Raguelle sat down again, putting back on her reading glasses and staring at the cathode ray of the computer screen, Katrin leaned over from the other side of the desk, a slight twist to her features. She was one of the Nazzadi Elect; comparatively much rarer than those who were members of _Homo sapiens sapiens_. The population of the dark-skinned siblings of humanity were more arcologised than the natives, and the area around Nazza-Duhni (what had been Cuba before the Unification) was one of the few oceanic areas where the faithful of the Esoteric Order of Dagon could not swim. Those of them who had made it to be among the faithful had rejected their false, Yuggothian heritage in its entirety.

"Khonatqa hasn't poked her head around yet," Katrin whispered.

Raguelle nodded. "I'd guessed. There wasn't a near-Chosen waiting by my desk to condemn me for my sloth."

"Too true." The other woman paused, twirling a strand of dyed aquamarine hair around one finger. "Why were you so hungry so soon after lunch?"

The brown-haired woman shrugged. "I always get hungry at odd times when pregnant. Doesn't matter if I've just eaten; you sometime just really need a protein bar."

"Really? I never did?"

"Yes, but you've only had two so far." The human paused. "And... um... I think you mentioned that the father hasn't been ever one of the Chosen. Just... um... one of the Blooded."

The other woman's red eyes narrowed. "You mean..."

"Yep, this'll be another First Blood." The Nazzadi made a squeak of joy; Raguelle put a finger to her lips, shushing her.

"Sorry. But another First Blood! That's really well done," whispered the Nazzadi intensely. "I haven't even been blessed in that way once. My _gulii'ywene_'s only a Third Blood, so my two are only Fourth Bloods. They probably won't even change fully," she added, with a hint of sadness. "Why didn't you mention it before?"

She shrugged. "I don't know. Partly because it's bad luck to say so early. When you've been blessed by Mother Hyrda so much, you don't want her to think that you're taking the credit for her bounty."

"Too true, too true. Hubris is always a sin. But I still don't see why you didn't..."

A message popped up on the screen of Raguelle's computer, with a faint 'bangley-boop' chime.

_**Code:**_

_R. Goldstein._

See me in 14 minutes.

K. Smeef'ubabhe 

"... what was that? Is is me?"

Raguelle shook her head. "It's from her. Honestly, she's like some school teacher or something. Really brief."

Katrin ducked her head. "I heard typing is getting hard for her. Fingers are webbing up," she whispered, letting the bulky monitors get in the way. "Really not long, if that's true."

The human made a brief cutting motion across her throat, to silence her friend. It wasn't done to discuss this kind of thing in public.

Raguelle tried working on the latest production reports, but the nervousness as the clock ticked closer was making it hard to concentrate. She had a bad feeling about this.

There was the noise of another message.

_**Code:**_

_Title: October Figures?_

Hi Raguelle!

It's just Fjalar here. Have you got teh October nums for 210x210x5 plating yet? My supervisors' getting on my back about it! Dman lazy unfaithful fell behind on their quotas in Sept; hope they cut their rations or something!

Fjalar

P.S. See u at the militia training after work day after tomorrow. Let's see if we can beat those gits at accunting (!) :D at it this time. If we can get best fireteam, think of the bonus!

She smiled. Fjalar was a nice enough man, even if she did understand the gazes he'd give her sometimes, when he thought she wasn't looking. They were paired as a team in the militia; she was the loader for the 120mm missile launchers stationed around the fjord. If anything tried an amphibious assault up there, they'd be getting hit with a bunch of anti-mech warheads. Well, anti-tank warheads technically; the design the Esoteric Order of Dagon gave to militia troops actually dated all the way to back before the Second Cold War, like the rest of the militia gear, but they could send one of the unfaithful back into the cycle of reincarnation.

She replied.

_**Code:**_

_Title: Re: October figures_

Heya Fjalar

No, I don't have the figures yet. They haven't been sent up from the work camps yet. Dunno what the delay is. I know they've been having problems with stupid NEG antinanofac nanites up in Industrial/ Maybe they're trying to control that/ I know the unfaithful have been making trouble. I hope someday they can see the lovelyness of the osceans and understand the faith.

And now Khonatqa wants to see me, and I dont think I've fallen behind.

Raguelle

PS If I live through this (joke), I'll see you there. It'd be nice to get the fireteam trophey back!

___________

Hi Raguelle!

It's just Fjalar here. Have you got teh October nums for 210x210x5 plating yet? My supervisors' getting on my back about it! Dman lazy unfaithful fell behind on their quotas in Sept; hope they cut their rations or something!

Fjalar

P.S. See u at the militia training after work day after tomorrow. Let's see if we can beat those gits at accunting (!) :D at it this time. If we can get best fireteam, think of the bonus!

She tried to continue working, but the digital timer kept on ticking, and far too soon it was time to see the boss. Her legs felt heavy and leaden as she stood up. She could hear, faintly, as if from a long way away, Wrupta say something. Well, she thought it was Wrupta. It might have been Qezpavawm. They sounded almost identical, despite the fact that they looked nothing alike.

Her chain of thought was interrupted by a sudden jolt of pain in her thigh. The woman stepped back, clutching at her leg, as she muffled a curse.

_Stupid table corners! By Dagon, why don't they round these things off or something?!_

There were sniggers from several parts of the office. She ignored them. Everyone did it occasionally.

Raguelle nervously stepped, limping slightly, through the door to the manager's office. The smell and humidity hit her like a hammer. Like it always did. It was indescribable, if you had not smelt it before, yet instantly recognisable if you had. There was dead fish in the scent, yes, and rotting seaweed, but there was also an undertone to it which sent your mind buzzing with invisible flies.

And it was not only impolite, but approaching sacrilege to show any sign that it affected you.

Naturally, as one of the Blooded, and a direct representative of the Branch of Fabrication, Khonatqa did not deign to note her presence, at least yet. All that could be done was to stand, gaze lowered and hands behind back, until the superior one graced her with her attention.

Finally the Blooded woman, in whose skin melanin was already being supplanted as the dominant pigment, removed her AR goggles, and stared unblinking at Raguelle, as if she didn't quite remember why this member of the Elect was standing in front of her. That was one of the things you noticed with the Blooded in their transformation into the Chosen; the eyes, even as they became wide and glassy, the skull itself shifting to contain the enlarged orbs, never lost the intelligence and sense that there was a _someone_, as opposed to a _something_, staring out from them. It merely shifted in nature.

She cleared her throat, with a wet gurgle. "Ah, yes. R. Goldstein." The words were still understandable, despite the inhuman undertones that instinctively sent shivers down the human spine. "I wished to talk to you about the production results from last month. Or, rather, the fact that they have not all made their way to my office. And yours are some of the ones which I lack. Why would that be, _r'yrpg-uhzna_?"

Raguelle swallowed hard. "I haven't yet received the figures from the work camps, honoured _qr'rcbar'uloevq-uhzna_," she managed to get the complex mass of constants and guttural sounds out correctly. It was a lot easier to understand Ry'lehan than it was to speak it, at least with human vocal cords.

"But, _r'yrpg-uhzna_, that was the same excuse you used last month," her superior retorted. "Why did you not pass the news of their failure to the camps?"

Raguelle bowed again. "With respects, honoured one, I did. They have sent me no warning or message informing me that the production statistics would be late this month, even after I specifically requested that they do, after our last meeting."

The Blooded woman made a neutral noise. "Perhaps." She yawned widely, sharp teeth (pointed and serrated, not like the chisel-like Nazzadi dentures) flashing in the light. "I do not need to remind you of the need for correct organisation of the _ha'snvgu'shy-uhzna_ labourers, do I? Not only do we risk their souls through an inability to use their bodies to our maximum advantage, but we also harm the cause of righteousness."

"Of course," Raguelle replied, with a bow.

"We are forced to maintain production lines from one factory to another, when the monsters that haunt our cause, both _ha'snvgu'shy-uhzna_ and _sha'tbvq-nyvra_, can use nanofactories because they can neutralise the nanological agents which fill the air. We are reliant on the use of the _ha'snvgu'shy-uhzna_, much as we are loathe to admit it. That's why," she snapped, "when I ask for figures at the start of every month, I receive them."

There was a pause, as Raguelle tried to think of something, anything, to placate the hybrid which sat in front of her.

"So go get them," Khonatqa ordered, bulbous eyes narrowed.

The human woman bowed, trying to slow her hyperventilating breath. "Right away, honoured _qr'rcbar'uloevq-uhzna_," she said, backing away to leave as fast as possible.

She was stopped with a single word, right at the door.

"And, _r'yrpg-_Goldstein."

She paused in her retreat. "Yes, honoured one?"

"Congratulations."

"About what, honoured one."

Khonatqa sighed, one human noise she seemed to be able to do very well. "About the most recent pregnancy. As one of the _r'yrpg-uhzna_, this is your ultimate and supreme purpose in life. Do you know the identity of the father?"

She nodded. "Yes, I do. Y'hu-thiyu'pth. I am afraid I do not know any other identifiers, although he has also sired two others upon me."

She waited for the elder woman to dismiss her. It did not come immediately. A strange noise entered her ears.

Khonatqa was _laughing_, her too-wide mouth open. With a smile, she shook her head. "How amusing. What would he want with you, I wonder?"

"Honoured _qr'rcbar'uloevq-uhzna_? What do you mean by that?"

"Never mind," was the response that came, as the superior one returned to her normal expression. "Go! Get me those figures by tomorrow!"

Raguelle made her way back to her desk. Her thigh was still hurting.

"Well, at least you're still alive, and haven't been moved to the camps yet," Katrin whispered to her.

She shuddered. _Gods, that's still a possibility. May Hydra keep me safe from that._

Out loud, she said, "Don't talk about that to me. About anything, actually. I'm going to have to make a lot of phone calls to the _fynir'ynobhe-jbex'pnzcf_, to find out what those idiots who only have to look after a bunch of unfaithful workers and stop them getting uppity... well, and keep them working, obvious, and find out why the fuck they haven't sent the figures yet."

~'/|\'~

**16:49**

On her way home (she'd eventually got the numbers, although it took far too long), finally escaping the office, Raguelle remembered that they were running low on food... well, not quite yet, but it was amazing how fast two adults and five children got through it. It was cold, wet, and the sun was just setting, as winter rolled in and so did the extended darkness this far north.

_Why couldn't Lord Dagon have conquered somewhere warmer?_ she thought wryly to herself, before mentally flinching for the blasphemy, and asking for forgiveness.

The streets were packed. The big festival celebration had only been three days ago, after all, and the parties were still continuing. Beneath her boots, discarded rubbish crunched, crushed up against the floor into a dense compact mess. People were dancing in the streets, waving gas-fired torches around, and considerable numbers were running around shirtless, despite the chill and the rain.

Raguelle smiled. _It's so nice to see the young Blooded enjoying themselves. They're so lucky to not feel the rain or cold._

Nevertheless, the backpack she carried when she needed to shop was really heavy, and with bags in both hands, she made her way home, rather than watch the dancers. It was a shame, really; there was a live re-enactment of _The Conjunctions of Dagon and Hydra_ going on, small children packed into the front rows of the crowd as they saw exactly where First Blooded came from. She smiled, in reminiscence; she had acted in such a role in public, almost nine years ago. That was, after all, where Ghuhalia had come from.

But the food was heavy, and she was cold. And she wasn't fourteen any more, after all.

The older children were packed in front of the television when their mother arrived home. She could hear the somewhat inane theme music from outside the front door to their second-floor flat.

**Ohh...**  
Who lives in a **city** under the **sea? **  
**Great Cthulhu!**  
**Squamous** and **greenish** and **holy** is he  
**Great Cthulhu!**  
If to **live** when he **wakes** be **something** you **wish**  
**Great Cthulhu!**  
Then **fall** on your **face** and *crsh*

There was a wave of complaint when the cathode ray television was turned off, with a wave of static.

_It kind of dilutes the majesty of the Great One, to make a show about him. Even if it is blessed by the priesthood._

Raguelle pulled off her damp outer layers, leaving it over the radiator in the main room, while simultaneously launching into a harassed rant.

"What are you all doing! None of you are dressed properly, and..."

Her eldest, Ghuhulia, raised her hand. "I am dressed too!"

Her mother ignored her. "...we have to be at the temple in fifteen minutes. Ghu, get dressed, then unpack the shopping."

"I am dressed!"

"Fraenkis, where's your daddy? He should be taking care of this. What does he think he's doing?!"

The six year old stared up at his mother. "He's in the bath. He said his gels are hurting him."

"They're called 'gills', Fraenkis." The woman sighed, her palm colliding with her forehead with a notable clap. "We do not need this right now. Even though it is a sign he is being Chosen," she added, as an afterthought. She scooped the five-year old Yhughui'ne up in her arms, giving her daughter a cuddle to ward off the tears which seemed to be coming from the TV being turned off. "It's all right, Yhughui, it's all right. Come on, let's get you changed into your temple clothes." She looked down at her elder son. "Fraenkis. You can put your underrobes on yourself, right? Because you're a big boy."

The six-year old smiled, a wide grin covering his face. "Uh huh. Because I'm bigger that Yhughui! You've got to have mummy do it!" he added, to his younger half-sister.

"Do not!"

"Do totally do!"

"Off you go, Fraenkis," their mother interjected. "Now, Yhuguhi, do you want the green robe today? Or the blue one?"

The five-year old, a full sister of Ghuhulia, burrowed her head in her mother's shoulder.

"Do you want mummy to pick?" she asked, gently. "Ghu, have you changed yet?" was added, in a harsher tone of voice.

"I did it already," the little girl called back, from the kitchen. "I already _told_ you that. Because I knew that _gulifr'kre_ wasn't going to be ready. Because I'm prepared!" she added, in a smug tone of voice.

"Don't you talk about daddy that way," retorted Fraenkis, on his way up the stairs.

"He's not my _daddy_, _uloevq'cn_," his older half-sister snapped back.

"Mummy, Ghu called me a _uloeb'crn_!" said the boy, his eyes welling up with tears. "And at least I don't have big ears!" he retorted, spitefully.

"No, I called you a _uloevq'cn_. Are you so stupid you can't even pronounce it right? I bet you are! I told you to get changed, so we could watch more TV when mummy got home, but no-one ever listens to me," Ghuhulia called back, as she pushed a chair into position so she could stack the fish protein packets in the high up shelves. She added, blushing, "And I don't have big ears, small eyes!"

Yhuguhi'ne began to sob into her mother's shoulder, already damp from where her raincoat had leaked, as the older children began to insult each other.

"Ghu, Fraenkis! Stop it! Fraenkis, go and get changed! Ghu, don't call your brother a _uloevq'cn_!

"But he started..." started her daughter.

"But she started..." the little boy said simultaneously.

"Enough! Just... go. Please." Raguelle paused. "Wguh'yului!" she called out, as she tried to get up the stairs while carrying Yhughui'ne. They grew up, and more importantly in these particular circumstances, got heavy, so quickly. "Wguh'yului! Are you out of the bath yet?" She staggered through the door, and put the five year old down on the bed.

"Yuh... almost," he called back. His voice was not-quite-human any more, the barking liquid cadences of how the Chosen sounded when they had to communicate with lesser beings (like herself) already insinuating themselves into his speech. "Great Cthulhu, it hurts! It's like I pulled a muscle in my neck!"

"What do you want, Yhughui? Blue, or green?" Raguelle asked her daughter, holding both of the robes up. The little girl just made a sulky noise, and hid her large, liquid eyes (a sign of her parentage) in her hands. "Maybe you just pulled a muscle, and it isn't the gills," she called to her _gulii'ywene_.

"Don't be an idiot, woman," he responded angrily, a gurgle entering his voice. "I think I know what my body is doing! Pulled muscles feel different. Just what I'd expect from a fool like you. "

She was silent for a moment, as she decided the blue looked better, and then tried to get the underrobe over the uncooperative girl's head. "Sorry." She swallowed hard. "_Va zl bja vasre'vbev'gl, z'lfrys znl unir b'ssraqrq lbh, fhcrev'be bar,_" she added, the ritualistic words of apology not coming easily through a voicebox that they were not designed for.

"Well, don't say damn foolish things like that then, idiot!" was the response she got.

Yhughui'ne stared up at her mother, eyes wide open and still filled with tears. "Are mummy and _gulifr'kre_ fighting?" she asked.

Her mother grimaced. "Only a little bit," she said, measuring out a little distance with her fingers. "Now, raise your arms, so I can get the midrobe on, and then we just have the overrobe and cowel to..."

"Because I don't like it when mummy and _gulifr'kre_ fight," she whispered, as if confiding a deep secret.

"It's only because we're in a rush, Yhughui," she explained to the five-year old "I got out of work late, and your _gulifr'kre_ is in pain, and that puts both of us in a bad mood." She paused "We'll try not to shout. Is that better?"

The little girl nodded.

"How was school?"

"'kay."

"You aren't going to say any more?"

Yhughui'ne shook her head, pouting slightly.

"Spread your arms, Yhughui, please. That's good, yes," she said, as she adjusted the underlayers so that they did not protrude from the sleeves. "Adorable." She sighed. "It's only a small mercy that the little two are still with the care. I don't know how I'd manage, otherwise."

"What do you mean, mummy?"

"Nothing. Go downstairs and wait with your brother and sister."

The dirty-blond little girl stared up at her mother, not blinking for a little too long. "He's not really my brother," she said. "He's _only_ a _half-brother_."

Raguelle sighed. "Well, you're all _my_ children. And tell Ghuhalia not to talk to you like that."

The little girl left. Her mother flopped down onto her bed, in the room that Yhughui'ne shared with Ghuhalia.

_Children may be the best legacy I can hope for, and a gift from Hydra. But they're also really hard work!_

~'/|\'~

**21:00**

"Good evening, and welcome to the Word of the Elect Evening News Update. I'm your host, Opuhgui Jeemes'ubabhe. Tonight's top stories.

Further atrocities committed by the New Earth Government against the faithful in Ireland. An undercover reporter shows the mass abductions and brainwashing carried out upon the Elect, and the ethnic cleansing against the Chosen. And will we ever have answers to what happened around Balleydehop? And in related news, New Earth Government forces have retreated from around Iceland, pulling their forces back, thus proving the efficiency of the Order's policy of 'Oceanic Restriction'.

Further attacks by Faithful forces against the intruding extraterrestrial Migou forces have met with success, with raids eliminating several forwards bases and intelligence outposts. It cannot be long before the Icelandic branches of the Esoteric Order of Dagon can liberate the Migou-held Scandinavia.

Production quotas from the unfaithful are up, year on year, by 3%. Economic specialists from the Branch of Fabrication put the success down to our increasing reliance on flesh-sourced labour, against the economic dampener of widespread use of nanological and micrological warfare against Order nanofactories.

A woman from the Elect has had quintuplets, all of them First Blooded. But our reporter asks, does the growing practice of fertility treatments to increase the chances of multiple births waste valuable medical resources and potentially harm the children?

And more, coming up. This is the news, at nine o'clock. Our main story tonight; the systematic genocidal policies of the NEG continue to grow in magnitude, despite the valiant efforts of Order forces to hold back the atrocities. The latest report comes from Ireland, where after the widespread successful attacks by our forces in April, the NEG propaganda machine has been zealous in wiping out any traces of our success. Luckily, a few brave citizen reporters have managed to smuggle this news footage out. Warning; this footage contains scenes of a graphic nature, including murder, mass disposal of bodies, and torture. Young viewers, or those of a sensitive nature, are advised to look away and turn off the volume."

"I think you should take the girl to bed, Rag," said Wguh'yului, somewhat roughly. "What are you doing, letting her stay up this late, anyway?"

"But I want to get to stay up and watch the news, like an adult," Ghuhalia complained, staring at the pictures of bodies piled up on the screen with a morbid fascination. "You let Fraenkis stay up until half eight, and I'm over two years older than him."

"Raguelle, do it now. I'm not looking for backchat from either of you."

"But..." began the little girl, before her mother scooped her up, staggering a little.

"Sorry for my failure, Wguh," her mother interjected. "_Va zl bja vasre'vbev'gl, z'lfrys znl unir b'ssraqrq lbh, fhcrev'be bar,_" she added.

The Blooded man only grunted, and settled down to take up more of the sofa.

~'/|\'~

**22:07**

Raguelle ran her fingers over her closed eyelids, pinching the flesh of the bridge of her nose. She was tired, she knew, but she had to read more of the Commentaries on the Apocryphia to the Book of Hydra. The words of the Great Old Ones had been lain down in the text, and the faithful could find the secret messages they sent as a test of their faith.

Through faith, all things were possible.

She looked down at Ulf, beside her. The one-year old was sleeping, thank Dagon, his tiny face screwed up. Carefully, she reached down, and brushed a lock of dirty brown hair away. It was so sweet when they were like this.

The child made a little noise in his sleep, and her heart melted a little.

Wguh'yului poked his head through the door, hair still dripping from his bath. That was a sign that the Blessing was coming in stronger, that he was getting closer to becoming one of the Chosen rather than a mere Child. He now had problems sleeping unless his skin was wet at the time. The ridges on his neck, sealed and useless because they were still covered over by flesh, lay as a testament to that fact.

"Rag?" he said, voice questioning. "Ghuhalia is upset, and she's refusing to talk to me. She's asking for you. She says it's something she wants to talk to you about."

She shared a look with her _uloevq'ybire_. "Do you think..." she said, letting her voice trail off.

He nodded, the bulges under his neck flexing. "I think it might be."

Raguelle sighed, and put down the book. "Ulf is asleep," she said, her tone mock-threatening. "He'd better be like that when I get back."

Wguh looked shocked. "I'm not stupid enough to wake him up. Honestly..."

"You've done it before. Need I remind you about the Incident when Yhu was little and you..."

He frowned. "Go see to Ghuhalia. Don't bring up things like that ever."

She flinched slightly, instinctively. She knew it was a legacy of her childhood with the decadent godless scum of the NEG, but any anger from her husband (a man with the blood of the Chosen flowing through her veins, she reminded herself) still frightened her. But she was his inferior-by-blood, and so would obey.

It was dark in Ghuhalia's bedroom, a place barely large enough for the two beds and the cupboard. Her mother carefully negotiated her way over the toys and clothing on the floor. Raguelle made a note to get them to clean up this mess in the morning, before she had to go off to work. Dagon abhorred sloth, after all. The room should be like the ocean; clean and pure. Yhughui'ne, her younger sister and fellow child of the Chosen, was already asleep, curled up on a ball under her covers.

The eight-year old was sitting upright in the bed, arms wrapped around her knees, staring through her mother, out into the lit hallway. Her dirty blond hair fell like a veil in front of her eyes.

Raguelle sat down on the bed, beside her eldest daughter, wrapping her arms around her.

"It's all right, Ghu," she said, ignorant of the hackneyed dialogue. "Mummy's here. You can talk to me." She reached out and scooped the hair away from her daughter's face, so that she could see her wide staring eyes."

There was silence.

"Ghu," she began again. "I can't make things better if you don't tell me what's wrong."

More silence. Then the girl spoke.

"You're going to die, mummy," she said, softly.

Raguelle groaned inside. It was time for The Talk. This was the problem with a child who would become one of the Chosen, when you yourself would never become anything more than one of the Elect. It was necessary to face the facts that you were doomed to grow old and die, your body committed to the oceans to resume the circle of life and your soul freed to, perhaps, become one of the Chosen in your next life. Little Ghuhalia, by contrast, would at some point enter the seas, if the Gods smiled upon them and no malevolent forces prevented the course of nature, and swim eternally; a higher, better order of life.

But Raguelle was one of the Elect, and so she knew that the best thing she could hope for in this life was that a little bit of her would live on forever in her children. She was far more blessed than she could once have been, for potentially all her children, including the one which currently lay quiescent, growing in her womb, might be able to become Chosen; three of them certainly would.

She pulled Ghuhalia closer to herself, against her chest, and hugged the girl tight.

"I'm afraid so, Ghuh," she said gently. She swallowed hard. "I'm not one of the Children of the Chosen, like you or Yhughui'ne or your little brother." She rested the little girl's hand on her navel. It was too early to feel kicking, or even a prominent bulge, but she could remember doing this with her younger siblings and half-siblings. "I don't even have the Blood of the Chosen. I wasn't blessed by Dagon to be born in a Demesne of the Faithful."

The little girl sighed. "I know _that_," she said. "But why does that mean that you have to die?"

The mother hugged her daughter closer. "Because I don't have the Blood. Because where I was born, people with the Blood were taken away by the government and tortured and killed, just because they were one of the Chosen."

Ghuhalia frowned, looking up at her mother with a confused face. "But..." she paused. "That doesn't make sense. Why would the government take away people with the Blood? The Chosen are the ones in charge of everything. The Gods put them in charge."

Raguelle swallowed again, feeling her throat rub against her daughter.

_How to explain..._

"See, long ago," she began.

Ghuhalia interrupted, "Great Cthulhu created life on the Earth and then he Chose his favourites and then Lord Dagon became a God, too, and then Lady Hydra did, too. I _know_ that, mummy," she said, repeating her teachings by rote.

Her mother paused. "Perhaps not so long ago. This is like human history long ago, not religion long ago. Well, it sort of relates. But," she paused again, trying to remember her dates, "... some time ago, like sixty years ago..."

"That is long ago," the eight-year old said solemnly.

"...well, people with the Blood were rare. And when they were found, they tended to get locked up for being mad, or imprisoned by the government." She noted the confusion on her daughter's face. "See, back then, because there wasn't the Chosen, there were only humans, and not even the Elect, like me. No, these were nasty humans. They were split between the ones who didn't believe in any gods and the ones who believed in gods that weren't real."

Ghuhalia got even more confused. "But... why can't you see that the Gods are real?" she asked. "They really exist. I've seen one of the _Cthulhu'puvyqera_, and they're his children."

Raguelle winced. How to explain this?

"The people who don't live in the Demesnes don't believe in the Gods at all. In fact, they hate the Gods, because they're evil people. And because they're bad people, they're going to punished, and they'll learn to be better people from it. The evil space bugs are also bad things, but they came to Earth as a punishment for the bad people who don't believe in Great Cthulhu. That's why we were able to take this island from them and sanctify it as a Demesne." A tone of wonder filled her voice. "They say that Lord Dagon himself came in person and killed the nasty space bugs. We have the Gods on our side. That's why we're going to win."

She ruffled her daughter's hair, and relaxed a little. They sat in silence for a while, the mother looking at the rise and fall of her other daughter's chest, the five-year old still fast asleep.

Ghuhalia spoke. "Mummy?"

Raguelle made a noise of assent.

"You can let go of me, mummy."

"I just want to make sure that my big girl is all right."

Ghuhalia squirmed. "I'm fine. I am a big girl. And you're making me hot," she said.

"Are you sure?" her mother asked gently.

"Yes! I'm sure I'm hot!"

Raguelle smiled, and tucked back the girl's hair, running her fingers through it. "No, I mean, are you sure that you're all right."

The little girl nodded, her hair falling back in front of her face.

"Say it. I want to hear you say it."

"Yes, mummy. I'm fine." She turned to fix her wide eyes on her mother. "And I now know what I'm going to do as a job."

"Don't you mean, what you're going to do when you're older?" her mother asked, an amused tone in her voice.

"No!" the little girl exclaimed. Raguelle put a finger to her lips, and pointed at Yhughui'ne, who was fortunately still asleep. "Sorry, sorry. But still, no. I'm not a baby. I'm going to become an adult earlier than other people."

"Really?"

"Yes! I'm going to go and get rid of all the bad people and save them all."

"Are you sure they'll let a little girl do that?" her mother asked, as she stood up.

"Yes! I know other little girls can do it. I've seen it. I'll make the bad people go away and then we can find a way so you won't stop being my mummy!"

Her mother smiled, benevolently. "Well, then I think you need lots of sleep, so you can become big and strong and clever. And you won't have any more bad dreams." She stood in the doorway, and looked back. "'Night, Ghuhalia."

"'Night."

And as Raguelle Goldstein climbed back into bed with her _gulii'ywene_, she smiled at him. "I think everything's going to be all right with Ghuh," she said, locking her warm lips onto his slightly bulbous and clammy ones.

~'/|\'~

The woman walked along an empty beach.

_Crunch_

_  
Crunch_

_Crunch_

_  
Crunch  
_  
In front of her, an eternity of greyish sand, reaching out into the distance. The unmarred expanse contained nothing bar itself.

_Crunch_

_  
Crunch_

_Crunch_

_  
Crunch  
_  
To her right, the ocean, mother of all life. It lapped slowly against the sands, the irregular beats a staccato counterpoint which accompanied her crunching footsteps.

_Crunch_

_  
Crunch_

_Crunch_

_  
Crunch  
_  
To her left, the sand reached out, until the bluish-grey haze of the atmosphere obscured all. Were there mountain peaks right on the horizon, obscured by the immensity of the air?

_Crunch_

_  
Crunch_

_Crunch_

_  
Crunch  
_  
It didn't matter. The waters were life; that was what the Esoteric Order of Dagon taught, and so it was true. All life had come from the immensity of the nascent ocean, and one day, only it would remain.

_Crunch_

_  
Crunch_

_Crunch_

_  
Crunch  
_  
Behind her, another eternity of sand. One foot, then another, her human trail insignificant against the expanse, and somehow blasphemous in its pettiness.

_Crunch_

_  
Crunch_

_Crunch_

_  
Crunch  
_  
How long had she been walking? Irrelevant. To walk beneath the sea was the greatest reward that one of the Elect could receive. Indeed, as the mother of children with the Blood, her function in life was that of a beach, a gently sloping gradient that led back to the sea.

From the sea, her ancestors had come. To the sea, her children would return.

_Crunch_

_  
Crunch_

_Cru*_

_  
_  
She paused, mid-step. There was a black protrusion from the sands, just in front of her; a pyramid-shaped spike from the wet sand. How she had failed to notice it before was a mystery.

No, it wasn't black, she realised, as she reached forwards, brushing the top layer, which turned out to be nothing more than a thin layer of soot, obscuring the blue-grey steel, concrete and glass below it.

Raguelle froze, instincts installed before human sapience screaming at her that something was wrong.

The light. That was it. There was that odd glow you got just before a storm, where the muted colours took on strange new undertones, neon tones insinuating themselves into your field of vision.

She scrabbled furiously at the object, covering herself in the black soot as she tried to find an entrance. This was no longer a holy place; the sky now was notable wrong. The air was thick and humid, full of static.

There was a flash of light in the distance, far out to sea, lightning in a cloudless sky, and the thunder arrived seconds later. Another one, and the thunder was closer. She was almost sobbing as her fingers felt, in this odd, soot-covered object, the sole object in this empty expanse, a hatch. The protruding edges were sharp to the touch; Raguelle quickly withdrew her hand, as blood swelled and ran from a straight red cut which ran across her fingertips.

The blood dripped down onto her palm and ran up her arm; defying all sense, it spelt out words in crimson. They were almost glowing in the noonstorm light.

And what it said was _Träte der Erzengel jetzt, der gefährliche, hinter den Sternen eines Schrittes nur nieder und herwärts_.

The words meant nothing to her, but the sheer amount of text, formed from her own blood, was making her feel faint just looking at it. It looked like German; a language which she knew nothing of. Indeed, the number of blasphemous histories written in it, which profaned the nature of the relationship between the Chosen and the Elect, which taught sorceries only permitted to the Chosen, and indeed had given the cold-hearted monsters who stood against the _Cthulhu'puvyqera_, the Spawn of the Great One, and vivisected the Chosen, the technology they used to persecute the real masters of the world, meant that knowledge of it was frowned upon.

_Fangen die Engel wirklich nur Ihriges auf, ihnen Entströmtes, oder ist manchmal, wie aus Versehen, ein wenig unseres Wesens dabei? _the thunder whispered to her.

They mentioned the monstrously sinful Engels; a sign of the depths of the depravity that the New Earth Government would descend to. She didn't want to know what the words meant; merely get away from this unnatural storm.

There was thumping inside the pyramid, buried in the sand, on the inside of the hatch. Raguelle froze, split between her fear of the lightning and whatever there was inside. There was now muffled shouting coming from inside the object.

"_Ein jeder Engel ist schrecklich_," a child's voice screamed; faint yet paradoxically loud.

That was what did it. The woman, breath coming fast as a thin layer of sweat shone on her brow, wrapped her fingers around the handles on the latch.

She had to rescue the child. That was all she knew.

The hatch gave way.

A wave of red and copper and iron and salt and warm stickiness came flooding out. It soaked the sand. It soaked the seas. It soaked her. The vital tide hit with the force of a sledge hammer, but nothing moved.

Raguelle choked, as the flood continued. _She couldn't breath!_ It was everywhere, filling her lungs, leaving her blinded, unable to move. Through her head, frantic prayers ran; to Great Cthulhu, Lord Dagon and even the Earth Mother her parents had taught her about, before they had been truly assumed by the Elect.

And the gods smiled upon her, the tide thinning, to merely rush against her legs. The pressure was there, a pain against her shins, and it was also meaningless, for she could move freely.

Raguelle bent in half, clutching at her knees, and threw up, emptying her stomach and lungs of the blood. It was already clotting, coating her face and hair in a visceral mask of death and pain.

But the terror was put out of her mind by another set of thunder booms. While she had been immersed in the flood, the cloudless storm and its thundernoon light had come closer. The flashes were near constant, casting the landscape in a staccato light of painful brightness.

_I wish I was wearing my eyesguard_, she thought, as her body, on autopilot, in one sense fought against the bloody tide from the object and in another walked calmly through the fluid, as if it were no more than a texture, painted at knee height.

The pyramid had somehow grown larger, except that wasn't quite true. No, it had always been large, even when she had been touching it. It had merely been far away; close enough that she could reach out and wipe off the soot,yet far enough away that she had underestimated its height a hundred fold. The woman risked a look back, just as she entered the structure.

The blood had continued to run into the sea, an unceasing torrent. The red taint was spreading, too, the grey-blue of the waters becoming a reddish orange, which glowed in the strange light. There were things floating, too, in the corrupted waters, as the blood consumed the mother of all life. Pale, gaunt and skeletal corpses, bobbing in the waves.

_No_, she realised.

They may have been pale, skin like paper and their flesh hanging off their bones in greasy rancid rivulets, but they were not dead. Or, at the very least, they had not stopped moving. For these... things, death posed no impediment. If dead they were.

Almost sobbing, face caked in now-dried blood as she half-ran, half-crawled into the glass, stone and steel structure, Raguelle fled from the polluted waters, even as she waded through that which had tainted them. There were handles on the inside of the hatch, which, with a yell of exertion, she pull shut, sealing herself in the unlit structure.

She waited in the darkness with her eyes squeezed shut, breath coming in shuddering gasps. Mindlessly, the woman rubbed her hands against her face, not seeing the cascade of flakes of dried viscera which fell off with each stroke. Finally, she felt that she could move again, even though the adrenaline which had flooded her system left her shaking.

She opened her eyes, revealing that a spotlight painted a circle of brightness in the middle of the darkness. In the middle was what looked like an altar, but cast in blue-steel, cold and hard, without the customary ornamentation. There was text engraved on it, but she was unable to read it from this distance. Around the altar, the floor was a clean sterile white, with no sign of the blood-flow which had erupted.

Cold white light. Blue-steel, glass and concrete. Sterility and inhuman precision.

_This is like something that the heretics of the New Earth Government would build_, Raguelle realised. Something like the buildings she had seen in her childhood, before her parents had escaped the lands of the unfaithful. Warily, she approached the altar, blood-caked shoes leaving no marks on the artificial cleanliness of the floor.

She leant close to the altar, breath misting on the cold metal, trying to read the letters on the steel cuboid. Carved deeply into the steel, the font elaborated seriffed, and yet readable, the words were in English; the precise, post-Reformation English spoken away from the Demesnes of the Chosen and the Elect. And what they said was;

**THE DARKNESS DROPS AGAIN;  
BUT NOW I KNOW  
THAT TWENTY CENTURIES OF STONY SLEEP  
WERE VEXED TO NIGHTMARE BY A ROCKING CRADLE**

The word "cradle" reminded Raguelle of what she was doing. She had to find the child who had been trapped in here, especially since the structure looked like something built by the New Earth Government. Raguelle had to find the screaming child; it was not possible to conceive of doing anything else. She turned around, squinting into the darkness that surrounded this pool of light.

There were five dolls lying on the floor behind her, that had not been there beforehand. Four of them were old-fashioned ones, not even made of plastic, but instead of some kind of ceramic. And they were shattered, limbs splayed and broken, skulls broken open. Lying under them, the broken shapes a patch of colour against the cold white of the floor, was a larger cloth doll, crude in the extreme. The yellow wool stitched to its crudely smiling head was thick and frayed; its eyes were nothing more than buttons.

And then it screamed, falling through a void that suddenly opened in the floor. Down it fell, vanishing from sight as it dropped away, falling forever. But the wail was trapped and resonating and, in its own way, alive, growing and changing and rising and falling as it awoke from its nascent form.

And it would not stop.

~'/|\'~

**4th of November, 2091**

02:02 

The wail continued when she opened her eyes, the infant beside her providing an alto choir to the baritone of the alert sirens. All she could do was lean forwards, clutching at her head and massaging her closed eyelids with her warm, sticky palms.

Slowly, with a feeling of growing dread, she lowered her hands, and stared at them as they glistened in the dim red glow of the emergency lights.

_Just sweat. Nothing more. That was a weird nightmare._

It was then that her brain started working and she elbowed Wguh hard, in the ribcage.

He awoke, with a startled "Fhtagn!"

"Siren!" she said in an insistent tone, actual sentences beyond her current level of awareness.

"Bhuh?"

"Siren!"

Wguh groaned, swinging his legs out of the bed, hands already scrabbling blindly by his side of the bed for his gas mask. As he did that, his wife picked up the crying infant that lay between them in the bed, clutching him close to her breasts as she stumbled across to the enveloped cradle that lay on the other side of the room. Raguelle's fingers scrabbled at the lock, trying to open the clear casing that veiled the carrier.

Both the alien Migou and the monsters of the NEG made battlefield use of chemical, biological, micrological and nanological weapons, and if this wasn't just a practice drill, protection would be needed. And very young children couldn't wear even the basic masks, let alone the full suits needed to deal with some of the agents used.

The squall of the sirens woke the almost-three-year old Kair, still sleeping in a cot in their room, and Wguh's child added her cry to the noise.

There was a knock at the bedroom door, and then it opened, light streaming in from the hallway.

Ghuhalia stood there, fully dressed, with her face concealed by the filter mask. She had a firm grip on her younger sister, who stood behind her, clinging onto her arm. She stood there silently.

"Ghuh?" asked her mother, eyes puzzled even as she fastened her own, Elect-Type filter mask, before going to Kair. It was simpler in design than the ones that those with the Blood of the Chosen had to use, adapted as it was from 2020's military hardware. It did not need to cover the nascent gills, which were a favoured site for attack.

A muffled sob emerged from behind the girl's mask, which wrapped around her neck, forming a tight collar. She looked away from Raguelle, to her younger sister. "The mother's woken up," she said, with a sniff.

"What's going on, mummy?" asked the younger one,

The elder sister pointed at Kair, "The infant's crying," she said, her voice very muffled by the mask; so much that her mother wasn't quite sure that had been what she had said.

"Ghuh, come over here and help me get Kair into her suit. I need to then check your mask; it sounds too tight," Raguelle commanded. " Yhughui, everything's fine. We're just going to have to go down to the bomb shelter, and then mummy and _gulifr'kre_ are going to have to go to their militia stations. Everything's going to be okay."

The small girl's face screwed up. "But it doesn't sound like okay," she said, voice quavering behind the hum of the filtration system. "It sounds like bad."

Wguh'yului took a few steps over, and scooped up the five-year old, prying her fingers from her sister's fingers. "It's okay," he said, in his slightly barking voice, trying as he could to be reassuring. "We're just going to get Fraenkis suited up, and then we can go." He shot a glance at Raguelle. She nodded, frowning as she stripped the crying two year old, putting her into an sealed suit.

There was a deep thud, felt more in the gut than heard, running through the building. A fraction of a a second later, the thunderous noise arrived, the glass in the window cracking, but not breaking. Through the gaps in the blackout curtains, an orange flare of light cast the dim room into stark relief.

Raguelle froze for a moment, Kair still squirming with her sealed suit only done half-way up. "By Dagon," she muttered softly, brain temporarily frozen by the implications, before springing into action.

There was a second thud, followed by an explosive roar of noise, even as the sirens wailed louder. There was noise above and below them in the cramped apartment; the pounding of feet and the terrified calls of small children.

This didn't look like a drill.

~'/|\'~

_Orjner. Orjner. Orjner. Gur pbzov'arq g'bgnyvgl bs gur znf'frf ner gb qba gurve fnsro'ernguref. Ubfgvyr'anavgr cynthr qr'gr'pgrq._

Alert. Alert. Alert. All the faithful are to put on their filter masks. Nanological weapons detected.

_Orjner. Orjner. Orjner. Gur pbzov'arq g'bgnyvgl bs gur znf'frf ner gb qba gurve fnsro'ernguref. Ubfgvyr'zvpebznp'uvar qrngu'guvat qr'gr'pgrq._

Alert. Alert. Alert. All the faithful are to put on their filter masks. Micrological weapons detected.

_Orjner. Orjner. Orjner. Gur pbzov'arq g'bgnyvgl bs gur znf'frf ner gb qba gurve fnsro'ernguref. Ivehfrf naq onpgrevn sebz gur sbr qr'gr'pgrq._

Alert. Alert. Alert. All the faithful are to put on their filter masks. Biological weapons detected.

_Va Dagon'anzr, fgnaq ernql! Nyy zvyvgvn'crbcyr tb gb jurer lbh zhfg or sbe evtugrbhf'arff. Hayvx'r gur pnx'r, guvf vf abg n yvr! Jr ner haqre guerng'qrngu fbheprq sebz New Earf Guddermount oy'nfcurzref. Gurl zhfg or erchyfrq, fb gung nyy zhfg or jryy. Jr'qb guvf nyy sbe gur ibqf._

In the Name of Dagon, stand ready! All members of the militia are to report to their stations. This is not a drill! The blasphemers of the New Earth Government are attacking. Stand ready to ward off the faithless. The Gods fight with us.

_Va Hydra'anzr, ceb'grpg gur lbhat! Nyy gubf'r gbb byq, l'bhat, be punat'rq sbe gur zvyvgvn ner gb tb gb'n cebkvzvgl furygre'jneq. One snfg gur tngrf gb xrrc nyy fnsr j'vguva sebz z'bafgref. Gurer vf ab jnl jr pna ybfr!_

In the Name of Hydra, protect the young! All individuals not in the militia are to go to their nearest security shelter. Ward fast the doors so that the blasphemers do not find you. We shall prevail!

_Orjner. Orjner. Orjner. Gur pbzov'arq g'bgnyvgl bs gur znf'frf ner gb qba gurve fnsro'ernguref. Ubfgvyr'anavgr cynthr qr'gr'pgrq._

Alert. Alert. Alert. All the faithful are to put on their filter masks. Nanological weapons detected...

~'/|\'~

**02:17**

After the explosions had thrown everything into a sharp relief, everything had become easier. The children went down to the shelters, deep under their apartment complex, dug into the volcanic rock, with a minimum of protest, and with one last hug, Raguelle and Wguh'yului went their separate ways. He was a powered armour pilot; his eyesight had not deteriorated enough (as the vision of all the Blooded did, as the inhuman side of their ancestry won out) that he was incapable of using the longer ranged weapons which they mounted, and so served as rapid response to fill any holes which may have opened. She, by contrast, was not a full member of the military; only a member of them militia, like almost every faithful adult on the island, and an Elect member of it at that. As a consequences, her main role was to lay down her life at a static heavy weapon, keeping it firing as long as possible.

To put things simply, the fjord was designed to be a killing zone. The stubby, armoured domes of the Eyes provided a phalanx of coherent light which would require a major naval effort to break. They were protected by lesser defences; fixed turrets, and roaming squads of mecha and powered armour, ready to be deployed to anywhere there looked like there might be a break. The waterside buildings and apartments were actually uninhabited; heavily reinforced and turned into pillboxes camouflaged among the other buildings. Both the militia, which mostly consisted of the Elect, equipped with pre-Second Cold War equipment, and the regular forces, who were armed with the more modern equipment from the Order's heavily limited number of nanofactories were stationed in these bunkers, with large amounts of heavy weapons to overcome their relative deficit of vehicles. Anti-air positions bristled the rooftops, hoping through weight of fire to overcome the sophisticated NEG and Migou craft that might try to attack. The fjord itself was a veritable minefield; only the Chosen knew the safe routes through the chained munitions.

It was acknowledged that the New Earth Government could probably break these lines, as could the Migou. But the really heavy defences were in Cthulhu'ybeq Ahefrel, not here. The cost of an assault on this city would be high; the strategic balance was set up so that it would require forces which both of the other two major forces could not spare, or the other would take advantage of it.

Raguelle Goldstein huddled down in the ground floor of one of the armoured apartment complexes, her eyesguard and filter mask on under a helmet, wearing a ballistic vest. The out-vent of the filter mask, strapped to the system on her back, steamed. It was all coloured in this odd grey-white-black-blue crosshatched pattern, broken shapes made of of more broken shapes. That was meant to make it harder to see at night.

What it was wasn't, in her very certain opinion, was warm enough. The rain earlier had frozen solid; The frost glimmered in the still night air. This was all visible; the eyesguard was currently in "Enhance" mode, and so the photosensitive front plate picked up the ambient light and gave a colour-boosted image of the night. In battle, where the directed energy weapons could blind (laser weaponry could burn out a retina, merely from looking at the focal point), it would clamp down, cutting down the light to safe levels, but for now, the frozen night was somewhat beautiful.

And bloody cold. That was one of the problems when the high ranks of the Branch of Defence were entirely made out of the Chosen and the eldest among the unchanged Blooded. They didn't really feel the chill, unlike the inferior mammals who served and worshipped them. That meant that the equipment issued often failed to take into account fully the requirements of warm-blooded creatures.

"In Cthulhu's name, it's cold," remarked Fjalar, squatting by the launcher, his voice muffled by the mask. They had been told to keep their headset radios off; it was said that the New Earth Government had sensor technologies so good that it could lob a missile right through a window of a building if it detected the use of military frequencies with invalid encryption. That didn't help one bit against the Migou, who (it was hypothesised) communicated by some kind of pseudotelepathic machinery built into their mecha, but it was feared greatly by the Esoteric Order of Dagon.

"Too true," she replied, huddling close to the wall, trying to trap the waste heat from the filter system.

"I hope it warms up later," he added, in a pessimistic voice. "I bet we're sticking out like hot stuff in heat-seeing gear."

"Not likely though."

They squatted in silence for a while, Raguelle staring out over the bay. One of the members of the true armed forces of the Order passed by, dressed in the fish scale-like modern armour, checking that everyone was in place, and that there was no unauthorised radio communication.

The silence continued. In the background, though it was not quiet. The repeated warnings in both English and R'lyehan and the sirens were interspaced with explosions, as the streaks of orange, only briefly visible when they cut down through the clouds, delivered their payloads. And it was the missiles that didn't exploded that were the worry; it was astonishing how many individuals nano-and-micromachines could fit inside a warhead, to be dispersed across the area. It certainly wasn't safe to breath the air now, and it wouldn't be safe for the civilians to emerge until the entire city had been cleared with EM zappers and cleansers.

And now shouldering could be heard from down the corridor-which-was-actually-a-trench, the clarity of the voices making it obvious that the two individuals were wearing modern armour, with a built in speaker-system. Well, that and the fact they were talking in R'lyehan, with a speed and precision that no fully-human mouth could manage. Raguelle strained her ears to listen, trying to catch what she could.

"Crbcyr ner qrprn'frq. Crbcyr'gbgny ner qrprn'frq. Va gur anzr bs oy'rffrq Cthulhu, nyy gur vafvqr bs gur Bp'phyne Tybor vf yvxr na noongb've."

_They're dead! They're all dead! By Cthulhu, it's like a slaughter-place._

Raguelle frowned under the mask. It was hard to understand, from the speed, and she was sure that she was missing things, but...that didn't sound good.

Another voice spoke, deeper, and less human; the cadences of the tongue of the Chosen more filling to its manner of speech.

"Jung! Bs jung gu'vatf qb lbh oy'noore ba nob'hg? Z'nxr l'bhe cre'fbany'vgl pnyz, naq gnyx, be lbh funy'y or chavf'urq!"

_Huh! What are talking about? Calm down and explain it, or I will be angry._

"Vzz'ngrevny gu'vatf y'vxr gur qrnq, nf zheqr'eref! Rir'elbar gurl sb'haq unf prn'frq gb or. Naq gurl oebx'r gur z'npuvarf. Gur pra-geny pbageby flfg'rzf gb gur sver pn'cnovy'vgvrf bs gur Bp'phyne Tybor ner aba-sha'pgvb'any. Gurl'ir gnxra qbja bar bs bhe znva qr'sraprf. Naq jvgu gur zbgure sh'pxvat NEG wnzz'vat bhe enq'vb va-bhg, jr pna'g rira ercbeg vg. Gur onf'gneqf fubhyq tb shpx nyy gurve fvfg'ref hag'vy gurl trg cert'anag!"

_They were like_, Raguelle frowned, "ghosts", maybe, or "dead things". Maybe "shadows". _They're killers. And the..._ she lost the rest, as technical jargon. Something about breakages. And something about radar, or radio, perhaps.

There was a pause.

"Vf guvf-n pregn'vagl?" asked the deep-voiced one, with care evident even through the inhuman langauge.

_Are you sure?_, Raguelle mentally translated.

"Nssvezngvir! Z'lfrys fnj bar bs..." he paused, as if to think for the right word, "...gur no'bzvang'vbaf, nf z'lfrys neevi'rq gb purpx jul pbzzha-vpng'vbaf unq fgbc'crq." His voice began to break then, breaths coming patchily through the external speakers. "Vg jnf nxva gb n uhzna va funcr naq f'vmr, ohg uh'znaf qb abg whzc be eha yvx'r gung. Gur rlrf bs gur guvat tybj'rq jvgu gur erq bs oy'bbq, gur fxva jnf yvxr gur av'tug'f fxl, ohg jvgu terl fp-nyrf, naq gurer jrer gjb guvatf, yvxr jv'atf ba vgf onpx. Ohg vg jnf vaivfv'oyr jvgu ur'kntb'af bs pby-bhe, f'cnexrq ry'rpgev'pvgl jura punatvat, snq'rq va naq bhg, npgv'ir pnzb z'nlor."

The younger one hissed his certainty. _I saw one of them, over a dead body, when I checked. It __looked like a man, but wasn't one. It..._ it was getting really hard to understand now, especially since the pair seemed to be walking away, _had... red eyes... which glowed? Its skin was like pitch? It had grey,_ was the word "scales", or "plates"? _And protrusions up from its back, like wings?_ Raguelle was sure that she was wrong here; they were under attack from the NEG, and that thing certainly wasn't human; maybe some kind of bound servant of the Gods. Perhaps the people... they were talking about an Eye, weren't they; "Bp'phyne Tybor" was the term for an Eye.

"It was was made out of coloured hexagons, and sparks of lightning and faded in and out of being?" muttered Fjalar, beside her.

"What?" she whispered back.

"What I caught from the end bit. He really made no sense at the end, but he was talking really quickly. I didn't catch most of it, but I paid attention when he started breathing like that." He paused. "I'm really bad at sentence structure in R'lyehan," he admitted.

"Someone is dead," Raguelle replied softly, a thoughtful tone competing with the rising panic in her voice. "Many someones. And it's something to do with the Eyes."

Fjalar shook his head. "I'm sure it's nothing that important. He sounded very young and weak in the Blood. That means that he is less divine, and more fallible, like us."

She nodded. "You're right." She was still worried, though, so responded in the best way possible. "We should pray though, because faith solves all problems, and so the Great Old Ones will show a way through whatever that panic was.

And so they bowed their heads, and said a brief prayer, to the glory of the Gods, and victory everlasting.

~'/|\'~

**02:24**

A dark shape moved up the fjord, unnaturally strong legs beating. The surface of the water, reflecting the fire-lit clouds, rippled and bulged as the hidden monster pushed its way along, walking along the bottom of the deep-water channel. Blue-green light flared around it, muffled blasts of water exploding upwards; always in front of it, never quite where it was.

A second shape followed it.

And a third.

The Eyes were silent. They had already been blinded. The technicians and soldiers stationed within, those who would have controlled the blessed implements that guarded the faithful from such abominations against all things which were right were all dead. The implements of righteousness were charnel houses, painted with blood and broken-stringed marionettes.

A head broke the surface of the waters, four eyes aflame with viridian light.

Raguelle, gripping onto the missile box, legs weak from the terrors which her mind had been inventing, ever since overhearing that conversation, fell to her knees.

"We're saved," she breathed, barely subvocalising the words. "We're... we're actually saved." She felt her eyes begin to water, behind the mask. She stood up then, shouting loudly, "We're saved. Lord Dagon... he has called for his... for his," she swallowed hard, voice filled with religious awe, "for his eldest children."

From all around the frontline fortifications, masses of concrete protruding up against the cold waters of the Atlantic, a ragged cheer arose. These were surely the _Dagon'puvyqera_; the spawn of Dagon. His first generation children, the most ancient and powerful among the Deep Ones, grown massive and among their kind, only inferior to their father. He had granted them some of his powers, to act as the givers of his laws, and serve as his eyes and ears where he could not be. Great and powerful, they would fight off the infidels of the New Earth Government; show them the strength of true faith.

Unless...

No, that was impossible. Could it be? Could Great Cthulhu himself have sent dreams to the _Cthulhu'puvyqera_, telling them to aid the servants of his highest servant; the faithful who lives and died for him? It was unlikely, true, although the _R'lyeh Texts_ (Authorised Elect Translation) did mention that, before he woke, he would send his own eldest children, who were foretold in Norse mythology through dark whispers in the night as the Ægirsdóttir, out to reward the faithful. They would come in a time of great need, when comets bloomed in the skies overhead and the old crumbled and fell. And as explosions blossomed across the city as missiles streaked across the sky, smart submutions cutting down anyone not under cover and the invisible plague of NMB warfare making the air unsafe, it seemed to be appropriate.

If it were true, then this was a momentous occasion. The blasphemers who denied his glory would even deserve thanks, for through their sins they had unintentionally bought salvation for all.

The figure was by now half-way out of the water, water cascading off its flanks. It was not well lit; its shape was a darker patch against the sky, with only those four eyes, awesome in the traditional sense, giving off light. Even night-vision goggles worked imperfectly, somehow skipping slightly away from it. In the light of the fires than now spread across the city, from the missiles that the NEG were now lobbing against the innocent civilians of the Elect, it was barely visible. It carried something, though, but what it was could not be determined.

Another head emerged from behind it, and two harsh, actinic white eyes joined its sibling in staring over the city of Dagon'uvtu Oraribyrapr. They both continued their inexorable march, though, and the third sibling, one crimson Cyclopean orb atop its head, joined them.

By now, religious ecstasy had overcome many of the Elect and those with the Blood of the Chosen who manned the defences. They were in the presence of the holy of holy. What could stand and stare those so favoured by the Gods in the eye?

And that was when the lead figure; all four of its eyes now filled with a terrible emotion, illuminated the area with death.

It did not love them. It did not even hate them. No, it held them in contempt; as scum, inferior beings that had to be removed. And that was far more terrible, because at least hate would have implied emotional parity. A foe that hates you recognises your existence, if only because it lives to see you dead.

Contempt was cold and sterile.

The raw material of suns washed over the fortifications. Vomited forth from the thing it carried, it left slagged twisted remains, vaporising the buildings behind them and the inhabitants within with equal prejudice. The reaper moved back and forwards, scything through the protections and crippling their defences.

Burning, always burning.

Slowly and methodically excising what it saw as a cancer.

~'/|\'~

_Raguelle! Raguelle!_

She had never understood. For all she had thought she had been so wise, she had been as a child, knowing nothing, seeing only what her parents would let her, hearing only what they had said.

The Gods had seemed close. That she had borne two children to one of their Chosen had been the greatest gift in her life, the purpose for which she had been put upon this earth.

_Now, nothing matters. Nothing. The Gods have rejected us and chosen instead the... the _monsters _of the New Earth Government._

Why? Why? Why have you forsaken us?

She opened her eyes.

Nothing. Well, not quite nothing. There were glimmers of light, but they were blurred; smeared refractions over her vision. Just these tiny twinkles pained her, tears welling up out of her squinting eyes.

She coughed twice, her body twisting up as she did it. It hurt to breath, Raguelle realised, as she returned to full consciousness; the coughs were thus agony.

"No, don't talk," the voice said softly, trying to sound reassuring. Even in the blurred state in which she existed, it wasn't working. Beneath the placating tone, there were strong undercurrents of terror and stress. "You've got to be okay, Raguelle, you've got to!"

She tried to open her eyes wider, even though the light pained her. And it was dim light; some kind of emergency lighting, judging from the red nature of it. "Wguh?" she asked, her voice an odd rasp.

There was movement above her, a dark shape moving through the red light. "No," it ('it' was certainly a 'he', she was pretty sure) said. "It's Fjalar. You remember me, don't you?" he asked, in what she thought was a hopeful tone of voice. "How much can you remember? Where do you know me from, for example?"

She thought for a moment. There was a blurred veil over her memories, true, just as there was a blurred veil over her eyes, but it was torn in places, and she could see through in places.

Raguelle licked her lips, and swallowed hard. "Work," she croaked, not feeling up to the task of coherent sentences. "Militia miss... missile launcher?" she added, in a questioning tone.

The dark shape (head; it was his head, she realised) moved again. "Good," he said, in a relived tone. "You at least remember something this time. Thank you, Lady Hydra, who watches over kin and those who are sick." He removed his head from her field of vision, a small white light appearing briefly. "Okay," Fjalar then said, taking a deep breath. "Right. What does it say I should do next, now that you're conscious again?"

There was a pause, where Raguelle could only focus on the pain of breathing in and out, in and out, while the white light flicked around in the periphery of her vision.

"Note down the time of awakening," a blue-green light flashed into existence, before vanishing just as rapidly as it appeared. "Twenty-three past six in the morning. And then I need to talk to you," he said finally. "I need to keep you conscious, keep on talking to you, to prevent you from going into shock."

Groaning and coughing, spasms of agony running through her body, the woman tried to sit up, only to be pushed back down, firmly but gently, by a hand to the chest. She glared as best she could with this blurred vision at what she hoped was his face.

"What happened?" she rasped.

"Well..."

~'/|\'~

**02:26**

In that one, blinding moment of betrayal, everything changed. The burning, terrible white of the jet of high-energy plasma illuminated the area in stark brightness, and cast rigid shadows where it did not illuminate. Even the clouds above them, previously lit by the fires and the near perfect half-moon shining through, were thrown into relief; a grey veil that hid the darkness of the night's sky. The second behemoth joined in the volley of fire, though it did not chose to give the death it bore in one single jet. No, it spat out a near continuous stream of suns; burning plasma which only added to this false daylight which the leviathans which emerged from the waters had willed into being.

Fjalar only stared at the terror before him, eyes wide behind the flash-visor, which had darkened to its maximum setting.

_It's horrible. Why. Why. Why._

Belatedly, he remembered why he was here. Why the sanctified forces of justice had placed him here, and blessed his gear. He was here to protect the Gods themselves, protect them from the blasphemers; protect the Chosen, the Blooded and the Elect alike. He spun the launcher towards the lead figure, and then threw himself to the ground, as the stream of suns from the maw of the device that the second figure swept around.

It passed over his head; far over his head, slamming into the dead monolith that had once been one of the Eyes. Even from that far away, the wash of heat, as so many new-born stars were born and then extinguished themselves against the metal and ceramics of the stilled Eye, licked at his back. The interior of his eyesguard pulsed into waves of colour, as the magnetic fields forced a shutdown of the systems.

The noise was horrific. It had ceased to be noise long ago, and was now some physical pain in the ears. Fjalar was wearing ear protection; the equipment issued to the militia came with it, despite the age of the designs, dating back to before even the Second Cold War. It still hurt; the roaring hiss of gas flame, magnified uncounted times.

He pulled himself to his feet. There was dust everywhere, both the fine grains of shredded concrete and ceramics, and glowing white-hot globules of metal, splashed all over the place. To the left and right there were people face-down in the fortifications. The metal drops had burned their way through the armoured roof of the building, designed to ward off missile strikes. The helmet radios were filled with nothing but static. They'd probably been fried by the plasma weapons, the sensitive Old American equipment not designed for a battlefield where directed energy weapons, and their attendant magnetic and electric fields, were thrown around in this way.

_They're cooling even now,_ he thought, idly, though the blur that filled his head, staring at the white hot globules as they faded to orange. Shock, betrayal, terror (gut clenching terror, which had already had its effect); these were the aerosol which made up the fog that clouded his every thought.

Fjalar fell back to one knee, as he realised what he should be doing. Squinting even behind the nearly opaque eyesguard, as the stream of suns swept away, he sighted back down the targeting computer for the launcher.

Someone yelled something. He looked to his right, then left. It looked like it was Katrin under the armour, but she was almost unrecognisable with the opacity of the eyesguard.

"What!" he yelled back.

She yelled something again, then the air itself screamed. From behind her, there was a massive explosion, which tore through another one of the dead Eyes. Just for a moment, in painful flares against the back of his eyeballs, eve through the eyesguard and his reflexively closed eyelids, there was the blue-green afterglow of the trail of a relativistic charged particle weapon; a charge beam.

He pulled off his filter mask, and sucked in a breath reflexively. It hurt like hell. The air was hot, like an oven, so rapidly changed from before, and filled with dust. Fjalar realised belatedly that the filter mask was far more than a simple filtration system; it held the air and cooled it, as well as removing hostile agents, like nan... nanites...

_Fuck_, he thought. _Fuck, fuck, fuck. There'd been that NMB warning, hadn't there? I know there was. I heard it. Everyone knew the NEG used gratuitous amounts of that kind of thing in their major __assaults._

I've done it now. I'm a dead man walking. I'll be back into the Cycle of Reincarnation soon.

All that could be done was to sell his life as dearly as possible.

~'/|\'~

Raguelle stared up at the face of the man.

"You're dying?" she asked, in little more than a whisper.

"Probably," he replied. "I took my mask off in an area without a zapper. We both know what that means."

She felt a fresh rush of tears run from her blurry eyes. "Dagon. I'm so sorry, Fjalar."

"You don't need to apologise for anything," he said, voice tightly controlled. He wasn't about to tell her that the same had happened to her, that this area under the slagged mess of the Eye wasn't NMB safed. "_It's not your fault._"

They were silent for a few moments.

"What happened later means that I'm a dead man walking, anyway."

"Keep on talking, please," Raguelle said, with a shuddering intake of breath. "By the Gods! It hurts!"

~'/|\'~

"What. Are. You. Saying?" he mouthed as an exaggerated fashion at the figure, who he thought was almost certainly Katrin.

He saw her pause, obviously split over what to do. There were a few moments of stillness in this hell. Then she pulled off their filter mask.

It was Katrin, her night-dark face shining with sweat. She mouthed back at him, similarly exaggerated.

The electronics on the launchers are jammed, she was telling him. Probably won't guide. Fire them dumb.

"What. About. The. Missiles?" he yelled back, choking on a fresh wave of dust.

The woman's mouth opened, and then closed again. Good point, she mouthed. Might have fried the electronics. Load a fresh one.

He nodded, an exaggerated jerk up and down of the head, and belatedly refastened his filter mask. At least it gave him cooler, dust-free air, even if he was probably infected with something by now

Fjalar removed his hands from the launcher, and hugged them tight to his chest, shaking. He took several rapid breaths of the cooler air, whimpering, until he felt that he could actually move without shaking. He poked his head up above the ceramic defences, out of the darkness and into the harsh light cast by the things that those... that those _abominations_ were doing. There were flights of missiles filling the air now, from both sides. High above, punching through the veil of clouds, were the streaks of a long-range bombardment; yellow-orange streaks which passed through the field of vision almost too rapid to see, before adding to the thuds and booms of the explosions which were marching their way through the city of Dagon'uvtu Oraribyrapr. The three figures that it almost hurt to look at, so bright were they, were wading out of the waters, the lead two methodically harvesting everything they saw that was larger than an infantryman. The third one, which gave off the green-blue after-glow of relativistic particle beams when it bought annihilation, was precisely wrecking the Eyes, removing any possibility that the anti-ship defences could be put back online. And they were spewing out even more death and destruction, from the smaller armaments (still equivalent to anything that a mech which the faithful could use carried), which covered their surfaces.

There was still only static on the helmet radio, pulsing as the monstrosities violated the atmosphere. With this amount of energy being thrown around in the air, metallic surfaces were building up a charge, earthing themselves with a static spark when they were touched. There were winds blowing, fanning and fanned by the fires that now devoured the city, and the four-eyed figure was in the middle of a gale, as it consumed the atmosphere only to send it back out from its weapon, torn apart to a stellar plasma. There was even lightning earthing itself around the figures, never quite touching them, as if it were afraid of them.

Dagon knew, Fjalar was.

The forces of the faithful were firing back, of course. But instead of the synchronised barrages of 120mm missiles that they had drilled to do, they were disparate and scatted, the electronics in the launchers fried, and forcing the weapons into dumb mode. And the leviathans of death that strode ashore, destroying and killing, were fast, moving somewhat erratically specifically to avoid the rain of what should have been their doom, blurred shapes dancing through the rain of exploding missiles that filled the air.

Wait a moment.

These were contact-detonated anti-armour warheads. They shouldn't be...

_Son of a bitch!_

"Pass me a new missile, Rag!" he yelled, as he tried to strip off the main viewfinder to get to the iron sights underneath. The LCD screen was fried; half of it was just black, and the rest gave a blurred mess of pixels and blobs of colour. "I said, new missile!" he repeated again, when he didn't feel the nudge.

He turned to face his loader (and he loved her, he knew that really, but she was married), already half expecting what he'd see.

He was wrong. She hadn't been hit by one of the globules of molten metal which had fallen through the metal shield above them. Instead, she was just sitting there, in the harsh shadows cast by the plasma fire, huddled up on the floor in a foetal position. Her flash goggles were off, although the filter mask remained on. The bloodshot eyes, wide open despite the dust, were contracted to pin pricks.

Fjalar's heart fell. "By Dagon, Rag!" he yelled. "You had to be an idiot and take them off, didn't you. You wanted to get a look at the _Dagon'puvyqera_... whatever those things are. They're not Lord Dagon's children; he wouldn't _do_ this to us!" His voice, already yelling over the noise, cracked. "Dagon, Lord! Why?" Gently, he pushed the flash-goggles back on her face.

He unscrewed the back of the launcher, carefully easing out the possibly ruined missile, which he (very carefully) placed in the grenade trench, outside the fortifications. If you could call them fortifications. If the things in the fjord called them anything, they would probably have called them stuff to stand on. Taking her key, he opened the missile box. The case was insulated, a Faraday cage built into the structure, exactly to prevent stray currents setting off or damaging the contents.

~'/|\'~

"I... I looked at the things?" Raguelle asked.

The man made an annoyed noise. "Yes! Yes you did! And you took off your flash goggles to do it. Those things also protect your eyes from NMB stuff," he shouted. There was a silence. "Sorry, sorry. I'm not one to talk."

"So... the blurred vision," she said, hesitantly. "It's not just flash-blindness."

The silhouette against the red light that was Fjalar's head moved. "No. Well, probably not only. But I looked at your eyes last time you were awake. It's in the handbook, in the," he broke into a fit of coughing, "in the first aid. You've got the blood in your eyes... you know, in that jelly stuff inside the eye; that means they're... um... attacking the thingies at the back of your eye that allow you to see. And the whites are almost completely red now."

The woman began to hyperventilate, painfully. "Oh Hydra. Hydra."

"At least you don't have it tearing apart your lungs, as well as whatever else it does when it's breathed in," he responded, a slightly wry note in the midst of the fatalism.

_It would be better to not tell her. She doesn't need to know any more._

"I think I do," she said, faintly. "It hurts to breathe. It hurts to talk." She drew in a shuddering gasp. "How can a person do that to another person?" she asked, tears running down her face, leaving tracks in the dust. "They might be unfaithful monsters, but who can sit down and just decide to do that!?"

"It gets worse," Fjalar replied.

~'/|\'~

He carefully loaded the missile into the tube, after rotating the dials on the surface which told it that it was being fired from a launcher with a non-functional guidance system. It was another problem with the ancient gear; the warhead relied on guidance information from the launcher. He should probably be thankful to Great Cthulhu that the ignorant fools who had designed this equipment had given him such a dumb-fire option.

Squinting down the iron sights, he spun the launcher towards the lead figure. It was really difficult. Not only did it hurt to look at the terrible brightness of the jet of plasma it was using to slaughter the faithful (there, a squad of powered armour evaporated, nothing left after the jet had moved on but the glassed area where they had stood; there, a brief sweep tore through an apartment building, the slagged wreckage crumbling like wet sand as the bottom floors vaporised), but he was having problems even staring at the monstrosity. His eyes couldn't focus on the blurred shape properly; his vision sliding off it. There were incredible winds blowing out in the fjord, which had come from seemingly nowhere, and flashes of light and booms which may have been the discharge of lightning cannons, but might have been genuine thunder and lightning. Almost weeping, he judged the best he could through this apocalyptic landscape, and pushed the ignition trigger. There was the pop of the initial charge kicking the missile out of the tube, then the main booster igniting, and a new comet joined the solar system of the warzone around the bay.

It missed.

Fjalar slumped to the ground, hyperventilating. It should have hit; it was right that it would have hit. A world where that desperate attempt failed was a cruel and uncaring one. Slowly, the urge to flee almost unbearable, he crawled over to the box, to grab another launch. He would have fled, actually, fallen back to a place where he could fight properly against human blasphemers, not these monstrous leviathans that he could do nothing against, but one thing kept him here.

_Rag. I can't leave her like this._

By now, too much of his home city lay in ruins. The offshore missile bombardment was raking its way through the tightly packed buildings, choking the streets with rubble and demolishing power plants and the desalination buildings. And the _things_ were just killing as they saw fit. The Eyes were the only things that could have hurt them, but they had all be blinded before the attack. And to prevent them from being put back online, they had been systematically eradicated by the things that they would have been needed to kill.

_I see. Everything. They just plan to kill us all. They have their own Gods, but they aren't like ours. They're just... things. Idols._

Suddenly, Fjalar had no energy left to even crawl to the box. He lay in the harsh shadows cast by the stellar fire being thrown around around the water, ears filled with the cataclysmic noise outside, and prayed. He closed his eyes and tried to calm his mind, but all he could see, burned into the inside of his eyelids, were the figures, burning their way through everything he knew. He began to whimper.

From above, he heard the flapping of wings, massive, powerful beats which forced air aside through brute force. The noise of battle dimmed for a second, as they passed overhead, before returning in full.

And then the wave of burning heat hit him. Even under the armour and the cooled air of the filter mask, it burned. The rad-counters screamed, the elevated background of the modern battlefield, where, after all, plasma weaponry saw use, running to lethal levels. Fjalar didn't see this, of course; he was facedown, eyes screwed shut, but he could hear, somehow, the fact that the Geiger counters were telling him that he was doomed.

He stayed face down for a very long time.

~'/|\'~

"What were the wings?" Raguelle asked, her almost useless-eyes now perpetually wide open from the tale of horrors which was being recounted.

"I didn't see," he replied. "It..." he began to cough, "it's beyond people. Everything. It's just not people. No people, never."

"What happened next?" she asked. From what she could hear of his voice, tear-filled and shaky, Fjalar was about to fall apart. And not just mentally (which he was justified to do, given what he'd seen), but biologically as well. The best he could hope for was that the lethal dose of radiation had fried the nanites infecting his lungs.

All in all, that wasn't a particularly good hope. She'd been exposed to the same, after all.

And in a hollow voice, he told her. The words were vague, incoherent, compared to his previous story; a patchwork tatter of something which had torn while living through the events. He could hold the pieces together when distracted by other things, but exposure to the same forces shredded them again.

He spoke of the blinding, fractured white light, that sparkled and shifted like a cut diamond made out of everything that it touched. How it had reached out and the wings had stopped. How it had illuminated the world for him, and shown him that nothing cared for anything, that everything was a purposeless mess, with no rules or goals behind it. That the Gods had Gods of their own, and that those Gods cared nothing for them. That the universe didn't even have the decency to hate them. Of how he had broken and run, leaving the faithful to save himself and her, dragging her rigid body behind him.

He spoke of the things that had emerged from the water, from metal boxes which had been invisible, and had used the attack of those three great leviathans to land themselves, without the faithful noticing. How they were not the Chosen, yet they had come from the water, not to pillage and claim the land in their name of their Gods, but merely to kill everything. How he had seen Katrin nailed to the back wall of the fortifications with a single rod-like projectile that protruded out from her forehead, her body dangling limply. Of the flash of blue which had taken out one of the towers, where the non-militia troops were, fired by a man-sized thing with four glowing yellow eyes on its face. Of the way that the enemy were completely silent, entire squads, seen from the cover of the wreckage of the Eye when he dragged Raguelle to relative safety, moving in perfect unison.

He spoke, and Raguelle listened, the world slowly growing dimmer as tailored nanomachines and micromachines tore apart the rods and cones on her retina, only attacking that particular cell type, filling the world with darkness and the vitreous humour with blood, just as the micromachines in her lungs activated an autoimmune response, slowly filling them with mucus and her body slowly fell apart at the cellular level from the lethal dose of radiation.

And there was silence, as he stopped speaking.

Raguelle began to laugh, a panting, hysterical giggle which hurt with each hurried gasp of breath.

"What... what can we do?" she wheezed, through the bloody tears that ran down her face. "We can sit here, and wait for the end."

She coughed, a splash of blood smearing itself across the faceplate of the man, trapped down here beneath the melted slag of what had once been a defence laser. All things had come to nothing. The crawling darkness that filled her eyes was waiting, and she could do nothing to hold it off.

"We... we," she gasped, as a fresh jolt of pain ran through her body, "we wait until they find us. And kill us. That's all we can do. Nothing more. We're only men. And they're monsters."

~'/|\'~


	16. Chapter 13: CATOclysm: Inception

**Chapter 13**

CATOclysm: Inception 

~'/|\'~

**1st November, 2091**

The sterile white hallways echoed to footsteps, as the Project Engel representative paced up and down. The woman with skin so dark she could almost pass for a Nazzadi, the Deputy Director of Project Engel, looked like she was getting annoyed.

"Where is Doctor Akagi?" Dr Malia Robinson finally blurted out. "Why would she just happen to be late today, of all days, when she's been turning up on time all the time before?"

Maya blushed slightly. "I did mention it at the start," the Magi technician said. "She's dealing with a new recruit for Project Magi." There was a look of sadness on her face as she said, "We've lost several operators recently, analysing the Herald data." Maya tapped her head. "You know how similar this is to the Engel Synthesis Interface."

The other woman winced. "I'm sorry," she said, idly rubbing the badge on her arm. "You have my condolences." There was a moment of silence. "Uh... do you know how long she'll be?"

Maya shook her head. "I'm afraid not." She paused, as an idea struck her. "We could go wait in the same anteroom as the pilots," she suggested brightly. "It'll both make us easier to find, and at least there'll be somewhere to sit. You haven't met any of them before, have you?"

Dr Robinson shook her head. "There hasn't been much time. It's been an autocensored Grade Omega environment for most of the refit, and I've been cooped up with both design teams and your maintenance crews for most of the time." She shook her head. "They're a... you have sufficient clearance for technical discussions, don't you," the woman asked. After receiving an affirmative, she continued, "... yeah, they're a biological nightmare." She rolled her eyes. "And I'm comparing them to the various Engel organisms here. I'm speaking from experience. And they're difficult in different ways."

"I've heard complaints from the 01 engineering team," Maya confirmed. She smiled demurely. "I _only_ have to deal with the Magi," her tone of voice giving lie to her expression. "But... all of them?

"Yes."

I thought that 02 was fine, last time I was briefed on it."

The Mass Production Model you have has regions of its body with worrying amorphous, unstructured regions," the doctor said, as they walked turned left, to avoid a corridor that had been sealed off with "Wet Floor" markings. "Where are we now?"

"We're just passing one of the legal sections," Maya said. "The access routes to the Evangelion bays are sort of limited. You have to come up and then down again."

"Figures. Architects are crazy people," said the Deputy Director of Project Engel. "Anyway, where was I? Oh, yes. Those bits of the Mass Production Model. Yes, if anything, they resemble cancers in conventional lifeforms." She glanced at the look on Maya's face. "Yes. An ACXB construct with cancer. The MP team is trying to keep it under control, and they're generally managing."

"I don't think Zero-One or Zero-Zero have the same problems... uh, and a right turn here." She cleared her throat. "But, um..."

"No, we... that's an Engel "we", that is, we think it's because of the immunosuppressants you're keeping those things on. Not that there's much choice, when you look at their natural regeneration rate. We've engineered the Engels to not reject the cybernetics, but Anton told me that they'd never worked out how to do that with the Evas."

Maya was getting out of breath. This woman walked far too fast for how much she was talking. And she kept on doing it.

No. It wasn't that she was getting out of breath from the walking.

_Oh, not again..._

A spike of pure pain hammered itself into the back of her head, straight into her limbic core, making her let out a sharp gasp.

Maya opened her eyes. She was leaning against a wall, a sudden sense of deja-vu flooding her mind. There was a fading white noise hum in her ears, as bursts of sugar and iron and bitter painted themselves across her tongue.

The Engel woman was standing about ten metres in front of her, with a look of concern in her eyes. "Are you all right?"

Maya smiled weakly. "Just a headache and synaesthesia," she said, the colours briefly inverting themselves so the white figure before her stood in front of a dark background. "Feedback from the DMI. It happens sometimes."

Malia nodded sympathetically. "The ESI causes the same things, especially right after implantation. Not surprising. They are related technologies, after all."

"Really?"

"Actually, I think Anton helped design them both. He started off as an AMMI specialist, after all." The other woman paused. "Sorry, sorry. People have said that I'm a bit talkative. Come on, show me to the other room, and then I think you'll want to go lie down in a dark room, if my experience with ESI implantees holds true."

Maya nodded, conscious of the way that her head felt too heavy for her neck. "It does, yes."

~'/|\'~

"They could have at least showed up on time," said Asuka, a sullen tone in her voice. "If they're taking us out of school and still not letting us down to the Evangelion bays, where they're keeping my Unit, then they could at least take us down when they said they'd do it."

"It's only been like ten minutes," protested Shinji. "Give them some time. You know how complicated this place is. And if it's Misato who's taking us," he added, a somewhat jaded tone entering his voice, "she'll have got lost again. Because that's what she does."

"Eighteen, actually," interjected Asuka, acerbically. "It's been eighteen... no," she corrected herself, with a glance at her wrist, "nineteen. Nineteen minutes late, now. Anyway, Misato has no excuse for getting lost. She has a peek, like everyone else. She can just check a map."

"Maybe she won't use a map, and just insists on asking for directions." Shinji wilted under the intensity of the Second Child's gaze. "Sorry."

"As you should be, idiot."

Rei said nothing, sitting as she was in the corner, reading. Asuka glanced over at her, before curiosity overcame the redhead. "What are you doing, First Child?"

The white-haired girl looked up, and stared straight at Asuka, her focal point slightly behind the other girl's eyes. "Reading," she said simply, before the gaze snapped off with a suddenness which was almost mechanical, returning to the book.

Asuka sighed audibly. "She's as bad as you are for unhelpfulness," she said loudly to Shinji.

Rei looked up again, fixing the same gaze at Asuka. "What was unhelpful?" she asked, in a tone which, slight though the inflexion was, might have been genuinely confused. "I provided information which resolved the query."

Asuka met that glance with her own glare. "It might technically have answered the question, but it wasn't useful. There's a large difference."

"Asuka," said Shinji wearily. "We're all bored here. No need to go picking fights."

"All information is useful," stated the white-haired girl, ignoring Shinji. "Can you not see that?"

"Trivial information is not useful," snapped back the Second Child. "I could see that you were reading. The implied question was 'What are you reading?'. Or maybe, "Maybe you could try talking to us, for a change?'. There isn't a tax on words, you know."

"Yes," said Rei calmly. "It is for the best."

"What's that supposed to mean?" said Asuka, eyes narrowing.

"I thought you liked the use of implications," was the reply, after a slight pause.

Shinji sighed. The First Child and the Second Child were like ice and steam; one cold, hard and fixed, the other hot-headed, expansive and volatile. This seemed to happen whenever they spent time together. The fact that Rei had trounced Asuka in every single attempt the red-head had made to beat her at swimming had not helped. Especially since that put her in a state of mind not inclined to aid him with school-work. The belittling of his ability was usually worth the free time he won by asking her for aid. It might technically be viewed as a form of cheating, but he was helping to protect the entire city from massive creatures that were trying to kill everyone. He felt that sort of offset such minor misdemeanours.

Asuka switched her glare to Shinji. "Don't sigh like that, Third Child. Stop being so wet and back me up here."

Rei smiled faintly.

"Is there something funny?" Asuka demanded.

"You would not understand it," was the response she got.

"Okay, can we just go back to everyone sitting in quiet, please?" asked Shinji.

"Was that a rhetorical question?" said Asuka. "And, by the way, don't say 'Was that a rhetorical question?' to my question. No, don't deny it," she said, ignoring his protests, "you were obviously thinking it."

"No, it wasn't rhetorical," said Shinji, who had actually been about to say exactly that. She was far too good at pre-empting him. "I'd rather be bored waiting for them to show up than have the excitement of an argument, _actually_."

Rei cocked her head slightly, eyes widening. "There is no need for concern," she said. "They will be arriving in two minutes and forty-nine seconds as of the start of this sentence."

That put an end to the conversation. Apart from some spluttering from Asuka, the next two minutes and forty-three seconds were spent in quite uncomfortable silence, the red-head hunched over the clock function on her PCPU counting it to the second.

Because the precognition was the thing about the pale girl that most annoyed, and, if she were to be fully honest, scared Asuka. Throughout her childhood, she had far more parapsychics than anyone her age would have normally; the Army was the single largest employer of those intuitive wielders of cosmic energies. Those classified as "Environmental" or "Somatic" were no worries; they were merely people who could manipulate natural forces, making fire or electricity dance to their whims, or enhance their own faculties beyond what human biology was capable of. They were just people with extra tools at their disposal; they thought the same way. Those which were deemed "Manipulative" worried everyone, almost without exception. No-one felt entirely safe around someone who might be able to read your mind, or, worse, rewrite it, even building a new personality to inhabit your body while your self was crushed into non-existence. But it was the "Sensory" ones which scared her the most. For as long as she could remember, she had always known that they were not to be trusted. It was not any specific thing that they did; it was something deeper, almost instinctual. They lived in a subtly different world from the rest of humanity; one where their extra senses alienated them from the rest of the species. How much does someone who sees the immediate past of an object merely through skin contact think like someone who cannot, after all? You might as well ask someone who is blind from birth how much of their perceptions of the world the sighted possess.

And someone who saw the future? Who could know what you were going to do before you had decided yourself? Asuka suspected, especially at moments like this, that Rei saw the rest of them as meat puppets, stringed _dolls_ who played out their roles without departing from the script.

She didn't like that. Not one bit.

_It isn't true, anyway. It can't be!_

As a result, the reception that Dr Malia Robinson received when she showed up at exactly 11:32.19 was not the most welcoming that she could have received. Only two of the three teenagers in the room even acknowledged her presence, and Acedia... no, she mentally reminded herself, she wasn't to think of them with their codenames... and Lieutenant Soryu was gazing at her with what appeared almost to be thinly veiled disdain. That was gone in a second, though, replaced with a polite smile.

She cleared her throat. "Uh... hello." She turned her head, to her companion. "Thank you, Lieutenant Ibuki. Looks like they're all here."

Maya smiled weakly. "It was fine, really," she said, poking her head through the door. "Uh, this is Dr Malia Robinson; she's the Deputy Director of Project Engel, and she's been leading the redesign team. Um...if you excuse me, I'll just be off to sickbay," she added. "It was a pleasure, Doctor Robinson."

"Likewise," said Malia. "Do you think you can make it there?" she added, a look of concern on her face. "Should I call for someone to walk with you?"

Maya shook her head. "No. It's passing, and this one was purely visual. I'll be fine in a while, and if it gets worse, I've got an emergency button for exactly that." She left.

"Well, uh, yes." Dr Robinson cleared her throat. "Well, I've already been introduced, but yes, I'm the Deputy Director of Project Engel. We're... well, you probably know this already, but we're another Ashcroft Project, likewise focussed on research into and weaponisation of ACXB... that's arcanocyberxenobiological, another one of the tediously long compound words that are so common in our profession..."

Asuka shrugged. "I'm German. I'm used to compound nouns."

Malia laughed. "Yes. It's even worse than English in that regard; it's a plague on the Germanic languages." She looked at their faces. "Latin-descended languages are much nicer and easier to learn. Proper Latin-based ones, that is, not ones like English which have just pillaged their way across the vocabulary." She paused. "Where was I?"

There was a silence among the Children, before Shinji raised his hand slightly, and said, "You were, uh, explaining about Project Engel."

"Yes, we produce ACXB synthorgs; the Engels which the Project Group is named after. They're notably better than conventional mecha, although at the moment they're quite a lot more expensive, and have certain..." she looked at the teenagers, "...restrictions on pilots. Not like the ones that Project Evangelion seems to have, I hasten to add. Um... not that that's meant as an insult."

Asuka still noted the tone of voice in which it was said, and chose to interpret it as such, albeit a minor one.

"We have a few other Projects in our Group, there's Klinge, and Nephilim, and a few others, but they're all fundamentally ways of expanding what we can do with the Engels. That means we have a lot of experience with lots of different ACXB bases, and have done a lot on the R&D into new ways to mesh the alien biologies with human technology." She glanced at Rei. "Uh... I'm using human to refer to all _Homo sapiens_ sub-species here. I hope you don't mind."

"I do not."

"Well, uh, that's good." She cleared her throat. "Yes," she said, as she subtly took a step away from Rei. "We're the people best suited to assisting with the Evangelions. I mean, all of the Projects in the Engel Group can be viewed as a spin-off from Project Evangelion."

"Yes," said Asuka. "I met Dr Miyakame over in Chicago-2, during the Daeva demonstration. He mentioned it, but I'd sort of forgotten about that," she lied, she had actually thought about it quite a bit, "as that was the same day as _I_ killed the Sixth Herald."

"Uh, we both did," added Shinji. "That is," he clarified, feeling a surge of irrational anger as Asuka locked a laser-guided gaze on his jugular, "we both met Dr Miyakame."

"I did not meet Dr Miyakame," said Rei.

"Okay. Um, yes. Thank you," said Dr Robinson, taking another step away from Rei. She cleared her throat. "He mentioned you two. I believe it was part of what persuaded him to offer his assistance." She glanced at at Shinji for a second, holding it a little too long, before looking away. "And I, well, I was also one of Professor Fuyutsuki's students, just like your mother. The Professor was the entire reason I took up the field of metabiology."

"Professor Fuyutsuki?" said Shinji, a questioning tone in his voice.

Asuka sighed. "The Deputy Representative?" she said wearily. "The second-in-command?

"Ah, okay."

"Brown suit..."

"Okay! I get it."

"... white hair?" she finished. She actually felt slightly guilty about that. Only slightly, but it was still there. The Deputy Representative was rather forgettable, after all, especially when he had Gendo Ikari standing next to him. Which was almost always, in her experience. The red-head glanced at Shinji; the boy actually looked slightly disgruntled. She shrugged mentally.

_If he gets upset about something that small, he deserves to be needled until he grows a tougher skin. Such a shame that I'll have to fulfil that onerous task._

But her heart wasn't quite in it.

"Anyway, yes," said the doctor, a slightly bemused look on her face after that exchange, "we should probably be heading down to the Eva bays... wait a moment." She pulled out a PCPU, her fingers dancing a quick series of presses on the touchscreen that covered the entire front of the device. "No, no messages from Dr Akagi. She could have at least told me that she was busy." She shook her head. "Never mind. Yes, we'll head on down to the Eva bays. Uh... let me just get a map..."

Rei stood up, turning off her book. "I know the way," she said, calmly. "It is not necessary."

The older woman smiled nervously. "Thank you," she said. "Lead on, then."

The group set off on their way, the pale figure of Rei, still clad in her school uniform, leading the way. _Seriously,_ thought Asuka. _Doesn't she have anything else to wear?_ Her fingers itched slightly, at the sheer unnaturalness of a teenage girl who only chose to wear her school uniform. It was like she didn't get the point of... no, Asuka corrected herself. It was almost certainly that she didn't get the point of fashion. It wasn't fully her fault, the girl admitted; it wasn't as if she had chosen to be a _sidoci_, but she could at least make an effort.

She felt a tap on her shoulder. Turning her head, she saw the Third Child, still looking disgruntled. Oh, great. Now she'd gone and upset his feelings, and he'd go and compound it by apologising to her when, objectively speaking, the only fault he had in it was being too wet to stand up for himself. She checked herself. Actually, he looked puzzled and upset.

He didn't say anything.

"What is it?" she snapped.

"What?" he said softly. "Oh, no. I was just thinking..."

"...and you wanted to have such a momentous event noted down?" Asuka rolled her eyes at the delay. "Finish your sentences. Don't tail off."

She got a glare in return. "Well, no... never mind. I'm sorry. It's just that... well," Shinji said softly, picking his words with care as he looked forwards at the Deputy Director of Project Engel, who was talking on her PCPU, "... it seems like every single adult I meet, sometimes, knew my mother. And you know what? I don't even have any pictures of her." The boy fell silent.

Asuka found herself entirely devoid of any response to that. "What, none?" she eventually managed. "As in, nothing at all? Isn't that a bit odd?"

He shrugged. "Apparently so. Yuki and Gany couldn't find any, and, well," a stress entered his voice, "my father hasn't shown me any. And I couldn't find any, even on the metanet."

Asuka's eyes narrowed. "That's really odd," she said. Inside her head, thoughts swirled and fought for dominance. _That's not just odd. That's almost impossible. No pictures on the metanet?_

What are they trying to hide? An Outsider-Taint in the genetics? Hybridisation? Some other change in appearance? It can't just be a security precautions for a high ranking scientist. I have pictures of Mama.

Or, most likely, he's just bad with computers and hasn't been looking in the right places. That makes most sense. There's no way someone Tainted would be allowed in an Ashcroft Project, except as a test subject.

Shinji shrugged. "I can remember her a bit, but... look, it's not important. I didn't mean to start talking about it anyway." He began to walk a little faster, the pair of them having fallen behind Rei and the elder woman.

A sudden wave of... sympathy, yes, that was it, struck Asuka. "Listen," she said, catching up with him, "I'll look through the archives my mother left me. Dr Miyakame said they worked together on the Project, right? There might be pictures."

The boy stopped dead in his tracks, leaving her to almost walk into him. The reflexive snap was stopped dead in her throat by the wide smile on his face. "Thanks, Asuka," he said, in an obvious tone of gratitude. "That... well, it really means a lot." He swallowed. "Really, thanks for offering."

Asuka could feel her face begin to heat, and looked away. "Don't start blubbering over me, Third Child," she said, somewhat harshly. "Come on. We're falling behind. I want to see what they've been doing to my Evangelion!"

Nevertheless, she did continue on her way with a slight smile of self-satisfaction on her face. Even the brief level gaze that the First Child threw back at her, which seemed to drill right through her skull and leave her feeling cold, failed to remove it, nor the slight bounce in her steps.

~'/|\'~

Major Katsuragi was waiting for them at the entrance to the bays, with a look of pronounced irritation on her face.

"Finally," she said. "What took you so long? And where's Ritsuko?"

"What? We were waiting in the anteroom that you told us to, this morning," said Asuka. "You said you'd collect us, once you'd done some work."

"I finished that ages ago. Rits said she'd send one of the team to get you, rather than make me go all the way out and back again." Misato rolled her eyes. "She made some rather hurtful comments about my ability to find my way around, too."

Both Asuka and Shinji quite specifically did not say anything.

"Uh... Dr Robbisson, wasn't it," she continued, turning her attention to the Project Engel representative.

"Robinson, actually."

"Oh right, sorry. Yes, I'm Major Katsuragi, Operations Manager for Project Evangelion."

"Yes, I know. We've _have_ met several times. And you raised several issues that the Type-D designs, which we took into account."

Misato momentarily looked blank, then something inside her head clicked. "Oh, okay. Sorry. I just couldn't place you." She smiled. "Thank you for bringing the children down here."

The other woman did the same. "Actually, it seems that this morning has been rather misunderstandingful. I only went there because one of Dr Akagi's assistants suggested I go there because she hadn't shown up." Malia paused. "Did you receive any messages from her?"

Misato shook her head. "No. I haven't received anything all morning..." her voice trailed away. "Of course. She was doing Magi stuff today, wasn't she?" She checked on her PCPU. "Yep. It's on my peek from yesterday." Slowly, her palm collided with her forehead. "I always forget that."

"I'm sorry."

"When they're doing work on the Magi, it screws everything up, as they steal computing power from all over the Geocity to keep several important functions running," she said in a weary voice. "So nothing works. It's really annoying. Especially when you've got some food being made, and it doesn't fab the packet properly because they've ''borrowed'' the factory's handler."

The doctor looked rather impressed. "You have the entire Geocity wired up as a computing grid? That's quite impressive. C-2 only has limited areas wired like that."

"Oh, not me personally." The woman from Engel looked vaguely annoyed at that. "I know, I know. It's just a bit of an irritation, as far as I'm concerned."

"So, is Dr Akagi coming?" asked Shinji, who hadn't really been following the discussion.

For some reason, Dr Robinson glanced at Rei for a moment, before looking back to the boy, and shrugging. "I don't know. If the grid is still being leached, if what Major Katsuragi says is true, then they're still busy."

"Well, in that case," stated the Major, "we don't have time to waste. There is limited time for the exercises as it is; we can't waste any more standing around. You will proceed to show the Type-D armour immediately."

The other woman shrugged. "Okay, then; let's go on in. Please put on these autocensors; if something does happen, it's protection, and they're also AR goggles. Are you ready?" She smirked. "Please don't drool over them."

"You're very confident," said Asuka, staring at the older woman with narrowed eyes.

"It's not egotism when you know that you're one of the best," was the response, which prompted a twitch of the mouth from the red-head. That was an attitude she could get behind.

The lights flicked on, shining brightly on the Evangelion bays.

Asuka took one look at the colossal figures that stood there, gantries and suspension cables still criss-crossing the figures like Liliputian restrains, and turned on Dr Akagi.

"What have you done to my Evangelion?!" she asked, eyes alight with an emotion even she wasn't sure that she could identify.

Shinji was pretty sure that it was a mixture of rage (that someone make such changes _without consulting her_) and elation (because, certainly, what had been done was most impressive), though. Mainly because he was feeling pretty similar. He suddenly felt slightly annoyed that he was feeling so attached to a thing which he only piloted because his father had bullied, blackmailed, extorted and bribed him into doing so, but it was true.

He glanced over at Rei. She was merely staring, pale face unchanged in expression, at the changed bulk of Unit 00. There was something in those grey eyes, true, but he couldn't read it. No-one ever could.

The original Type-A armour had been sleek, and almost form fitting, if the entity under the layers of plating was shaped anything like a human. It had very much been a suit of traditional armour; with no integral weaponry and only carrying space for a DF-knife. The Type-B and Type-C had followed generally the same design paradigm; they had been bulked out, and built in weapon systems installed, but they retained the same profile; you could see that they were evolutions of the original (indeed, the first) synthorg. But both the Type-B and the Type-C had been designed by the original Evangelion production team, without any true battlefield experience, while they were still handling the completely unknown problems of arcanocyberxenobiological engineering. And then the team had collapsed, with the deaths and madness of several key members, and the only changes to the armour, while the project had been mothballed and cut of funding, had been minuscule and iterative.

The Type-D armour had been designed in collaboration with the Engel Group; the wayward children of Project Evangelion, led by one of the original team, and with over ten years of experience, both theoretical and practical, on the unique problems of ACXB research,building off the original, revolutionary Evangelion design.

Technically, the same basic structure still lay underneath the Type-D, interfacing with the organism below, retraining and controlling it. You wouldn't have guessed it from the appearance of the machines that stood in the Evangelion cradles.

Previously, the Evangelions had a certain organic elegance about them. Sleek, curved lines, which mimicked the shape of human body, a naturalism which was slightly disconcerting to the onlooker when they moved, the limbs not-quite-human, but very natural. That was gone. The Type-D armour was very clearly a machine of war. Veiled in angled plating, armaments and sensors and odd, seemingly purposeless protrusions extruded like boils from every surface. Gone was the vast majority of the difference between the machines, all painted in an oddly repellent camouflage scheme. The sheer chaos of the random patterns drove the eye away, or else it got caught; endlessly searching for meaning in pointlessness so that the greater perception of the thing was lost. The only identifier; the heads, which retained their distinctive eyes, gazed forth from beneath armoured cowels, used as a further mount for more pointless chaos.

Over all, the impression was that of a grotesque cacophony of incipient violence.

The woman who had seemingly designed this mad vision of military technology began to explain. From the carcass of Project Daeva, the Evangelion Group had somehow managed to seize first rights to the mD/D Engine that the failed group had pioneered. The problems with the Evangelions had been that they had been too large for mecha-grade D-Engines, even the largest ones used in Behemoth-class ones, but too small for the capital-grade ones used in ships or static power plants. They had tried to make up for it by using multiple D-Engines, but the laws of arcane physics meant that... undesirably things happened when too many dimensional rifts were bought together. As a result, the Evangelions had actually always been underarmed for their size; had it not been for the AT-Field, they would not have stood a chance against anything in their weight category, whether Migou, Heraldic or even those rare monstrosities that the Rapine Storm fielded.

But now, the revolutionary mD/D-Engine, in which the D-Rift was spread over a volume, rather than (as far as could be determined) a point charge, reducing the overall pressure on local spacetime and allowing a much greater energy density to be extracted, was available. The prototypes engines had been gutted from the biohazardous Daeva and attached to the Evangelions. And that meant that the designers could arm an Eva as they would a capital ship, not a precariously scaled up mecha.

The words washed over Shinji's head, as Malia, forgetting her audience, rattled off facts and figures about arcane theory that he had absolutely no clue about; not having even learned the lie-to-children that was quantum theory. He glanced around, his gaze flicking to the titanic bulk of Unit 01, before the patterns got too much and he had to look away. To his left, Asuka was getting slightly bored, and annoyed at her lack of understanding; he just instinctively knew that she was itching to try out what they had done to Unit 02. Rei, of course, was listening intently, with every sign (insofar as such emotions could be read from her) that she understood it. Perhaps she did. Perhaps her brain had shut down from listening to this woman talk on and on about things that he did not understand and suspected he probably never would.

"... and the surface blue-green laser point-defence grid can acquire, target and eliminate a heat-emitting target with a temperature difference from background of 4.9 K, which is then further improved with the addition of a visible-light component..."

Misato felt that she could make a contribution at this point, from her own experience as a pilot. "So you solved the problem that older systems had with heat, both distinguishing and their own overheating?"

The woman nodded. "It's, as usual, a scaling issue. Due to the size difference, we can cycle between active lasers, give them time to cool between firing. Even a Blizzard or a Claymore could only mount two or three, and that typically meant that, with the problems with targeting, it might be able to get the first few in a salvo, but then the rest would hit."

"I had that problem when they were testing them, back in China in '86," Misato nodded, with her eyes narrowed. "You lost your own rocket system for the laser mount, and then the bastards found that if they got a mob of cultists to carry burning torches, and set fires all over the place, they confused the acquisition system half the time. Enough for them to whack you with their own mecha or RPGs from the mob."

Malia raised her eyebrows. "You were in China in '86?" she said, with a note of respect in her voice.

"I'd rather not talk about it. I lost several good friends in the... withdrawal." The bitterness in the Major's voice was evident. "But you've solved that?"

"Yes, with help from the Achtzig Group. Anton and Calvin are... well, they were on the original Evangelion team together. We've been working on our own LAI-run laser defence systems for the Engels with them." She laughed. "Actually, the work we had to do on adapting them for the Evangelions has really put us ahead. We got to see how a scaled up model worked, which means that we got to work through a lot of the problems in greater detail. The humanoid form is... not ideal in so many ways. Sadly, though, we haven't found an arcanoxenobiological organism which is a perfectly reflective sphere, so we have to make workarounds." She snapped her fingers. "That reminds me, on the subject of the Achtzig Group. Lieutenant Soryu, the Director of the Group, Dr Sylveste, asked me to send his regards."

Asuka immediately stiffened. "Why?" she asked, bluntly. "I have no idea who you're talking about."

The older woman looked just as puzzled. "I'm sorry. I just thought that... he asked me that I... he acted like you would know him."

Asuka shook her head. "I don't recall any Dr Sylveste, but you can thank him for it. Mind you," she added, as an afterthought, "most of the people with the ''Doctor'' title I met when I was younger have sort of blurred together. There always seemed to be an endless stream of people, talking about things I didn't understand then. No offence meant, of course, Dr Robinson."

Malia flicked a tight braid away from her eyes. "None taken. It was just that he said he was a close friend of your mother's. He seemed sure that you'd remember him." She shrugged. "Oh well."

_I think I can now see why the Third Child was getting irritated about all these people who seem to have known his mother. And mine, too._

It is _annoying._

"So, what have you done with the weapon systems?" asked Misato, breaking the detour. She was beginning to see that the doctor was remarkably scatter-brained, her thoughts jumping from subject to subject when something interested her. The creativity was probably useful, but the black-haired woman couldn't understand how someone could have such a short effective attention span while apparently being some kind of scientific genius. It didn't seem fair, somehow.

"Right. We've kept the main ones from the Type-C; they were fully integrated and field tested; all that was needed was a slight shift in their position to accommodate the thicker armour. No, the _special_ ones are the new, hand-held ones, which are designed to handle all the power the mD/D-Engine can throw at them and then come back for more."

"Will not the Evangelion shut down if you 'throw all the power' at the weapon?" asked Rei, her tone clinical.

Malia nodded. "Yes, it would. That's why there are four auxiliary D-Engines, mounted in the chassis. If for some reason the mD/D-Engine failed, they can keep it moving and contained, although they won't be able to run most of the weapons. At least for a short while, before the entire system shuts down as it depletes the capacitors, as 4 D-Engines isn't enough to keep the entire system running with the extra mass of the armour." She paused. "Not to worry, Miss Ayanami! The possibility of a resonance cascade scenario is extremely unlikely!" she added.

Rei just stared back at her.

Shinji and Asuka, meanwhile, their gaze synchronised, changed the focus of the attention to Misato. They were strapping a more experimental engine to the Evangelions (which were already neither the most stable nor mature technology), which had a possibility of failing catastrophically. Nothing good could possibly come as the result of "a resonance cascade scenario". And, on top of that, if the prototype engine failed, the entire snythorg would shut down

Misato coughed once. "Yes. You were about to explain why you needed all the extra power, weren't you?" she asked the other woman. She didn't like the way that her two flatmates were staring at her; she could see the nascent outbursts building behind both their eyes.

Malia nodded. "Yes, indeed. The weapons are configured to the intended role of the Units in the upcoming..."

"They haven't been fully briefed on that yet," interrupted the Major, "and this location is not secure. Do not mention specifics."

"Ah. Right. Let me start again. The weapons are designed for different purposes. Unit 00; long range heavy support. Unit 01; suppression and weight of fire. Unit 02; close range massive area damage."

"So what are they, actually?" asked Asuka, who liked the sound of "massive area damage".

"Well, actually, in your case, you remember the issues that plasmathrower had? We had the same problems when we tried to fit an even more miniaturised version onto the Seraph. We gave up; there's too much of a problem with the miniaturisation. Manufacturing defects, even when produced in nanofactories, cause greater and greater instability in the containment field which prevents the plasma from frying the weapon. Well, we decided that, by making it hand-held rather than armed mounted, we could scale it up. Enough to make it a viable weapon." She pressed a few buttons on her wrist-mounted PCPU, bringing an accurately-scaled AR model into being in the air of the bays. The plasmathrower was a good thirty metres long; bulky and heavy even for the armoured leviathan that would be carrying it. "And with the power-rating of the mD/D-Engine, you can slag cities." There was a pause. "Uh, not in one shot, obviously. Nevertheless, its enough that we had to armour Unit 02 even more, to prevent it from melting itself when firing the weapon."

Eyes ablaze with the future reflections of what she would do with it, Asuka could only let out a muffled giggle.

"I am glad to see that you are happy," said Rei. Even that comment couldn't stir the other girl from her reverie, although it drew Malia's attention to the White.

"For you, we've simply scaled up and reinforced the Eva-sized charge beam. That was remarkably easy; the older model had been cut down, to run off an internal D-Engine. We just had to remove some of the limits in the design, and add extra superconducting magnets and the coolant for them, then run superconducting cables from the weapon to the umbilical ports on the Evangelion. It's very much a heavy fire support weapon; indeed, it would actually be possible to connect it up to the other Units to increase its rate of fire. It will kill anything it hits that isn't a heavily armoured capital ship. Or a Herald."

Rei nodded. "Do not worry. I shall have a plan to kill anything I meet."

Misato snorted. "I say we should rename this weapon the ''Rei Gun''!" she said, looking slyly at the others. "Oh, come on. You know you were all thinking it."

There were smiles all around. Except from the individual whose name it was. "But it is not a ray gun," Rei said, a puzzled tone in her voice. "It does not emit coherent electromagnetic radiation."

"Rei, it's a j..."

"It instead magnetically accelerates protons to an appreciable fraction of the speed of light in a vacuum, sheathing them in a arcanomagnetic field which prevents them from dispersing before they collide with the intended target."

Asuka looked on at the girl with a sort of pitying contempt. "It was a joke."

"Oh." The girl paused. "But it still does not emit electromagentic radiation, except as a byproduct of the intended function."

"Jokes are allowed to be wrong if they're funny. You should read up on them," the red-head said.

Rei nodded. "I will." She paused, cocking her head to the side slightly. "So you have an plasmasuka, then?"

Misato shook her head. "No, that would only be appropriate if it were some kind of missile launcher, because the word sounds like ''bazooka''. They are both puns. A form of humour," she added after a pause, as if explaining to a child.

Rei nodded seriously. "I shall endeavour to remember that. Any projectile weapon fired by the Second Child which continues to accelerate after it leaves the weapon and does damage through an explosive mechanism of superheated ionised gas is called a ''Plasmasuka''."

Dr Robinson, who had been looking on at this with increasing worry, felt it was perhaps time that she start talking again rather than let the conversation continue. "Moving swiftly on, finally, Unit 01 retains the MBAMCIGA basic design, but now, instead of requiring D-Engines to be built into the weapon itself, it runs off the main engine of the Unit. This means that the weapon design, overall, has a superior rate of fire, a higher exit velocity and maintains its arcanomagnetic containment field over much longer ranges. Compared to the other two weapons, the improvements are evolutionary, not revolutionary, but that's because the idea of using a multi-barrelled weapon to overcome some of the limits of conventional single-barrelled plasma cannons... you know, the name is a bit of a misnomer. The kinetic energy of the plasma does most of the damage against hard targets, rather than the thermal effects. It's more like a particle beam than what a ''plasma weapon'' would imply." She coughed. "Anyway, it's a rather good idea. We're going to look into the prospects of a scaled down version, for the Seraph or the Chashmal."

Misato looked rather smug at the praise for the concept of the "plasma minigun".

"What do you mean, arcanomagnetic containment field?" asked Shinji, who was feeling rather lost again, and this time it mattered, as they were talking about the thing that he had to carry.

"Arcanomagnetic containment field? Well, the traditional issue with plasma weapons was always that the heated ionised gas dispersed in the atmosphere really quickly. And you couldn't contain it easily, because you'd need a way of making the containment field travel with the bolt. Now, with something like Lieutenant Soryu's plasma thrower, that matters less, because it's designed as a cone-like weapon. But for one where you are trying to have the plasma bolts act like bullets, basically, it's a massive problem." She squinted at Shinji. "Do you have a degree which covers Arcane Theory?" The response from the sixteen-year old was,unsurprisingly, negative. "In that case, I can't really explain what's happening really. Think of it as a sort of projected tunnel which the plasma can't escape from, so it's forced into a straight line. Does that make you feel better?"

Shinji pulled a face. "Slightly," he said.

"Shinji," said Misato, "in my experience, all you need to know is that _someone_ understands it, and that it works. Blissful ignorance of these kind of things is much easier on the mind."

"And blissful ignorance is something that he does especially well," added Asuka, with a smirk. "A minigun, saturation-fire weapon? Perfect for him. Even he can't miss."

"You may think you can outsmart me, Asuka," retorted the boy. "Maybe. I'd like to see someone who can outsmart the plasma."

"I can outsmart you," was her glared response. "That's not really in debate here, unless you never want help with your easy homework again, idiot. What I'd like to know is what possessed you to..."

"Quiet," said the Major wearily, "such an argument is pointless, and just wastes valuable time. Is that everything, Dr Robinson?"

The answer was in the affirmative, as Malia could see that Misato's patience with the lengthy explanations and frequent distractions was beginning to wear thin.

"In that case, let's get you three suited up. We're going to have to run as much practice in the new armour as we can, because we leave tomorrow."

~'/|\'~

**2nd November, 2091**

The next day, after a somewhat hurried pack of the essentials for up to a week away from home, the three Children and Misato were on a dull flight up to the staging grounds, in the north of Scotland. Dull, and somewhat cramped. The secrecy of the operation mandated that as few flights be used as possible, the rest being transported by maglev and ground transport. As a result, the squadron of what in an earlier era would have been helicopters, but were now transport, A-Pod equipped hovercraft, was packed with various military individuals. Behind the transport section, slung like grotesque dolls, were multiple Engels, encased in matt-green tubes which to Shinji's eyes looked strangely like entry plugs. He contented himself with his PCPU, and tried to avoid the eyes of any of the older men and women that surrounded him.

He was also getting somewhat airsick, and the anti-nausea tablets weren't working properly. It always happened; not as bad as that traumatic trip in Misato's car, but always present. Not that there were many things that were as bad as that woman's driving, of course. Being on the receiving end of a Rapine Storm attack, perhaps. Maybe.

It would have been easier to tolerate if anyone else had been with him, as a distraction from the nausea. Even Asuka would have made it less boring, though he would have had to tolerate a low-to-moderate level of antagonism, and insults directed towards his intellect. She didn't take boredom well, at least if there wasn't anything to lose by showing that side of her personality. Meanwhile, he just _knew_ that Rei would be sitting and reading; perfectly content.

The Evangelion project members had been split up, each on a separate hovercraft to avoid one unexpected, lucky hit from enemy forces taking out the entire party (although even one loss would have been terrible). Misato had remarked before they had left, with an seemingly carefree grin, that she was the most expendable of the Eva operatives who were on the 'crafts; the Evangelion technicians were travelling with the refitted synthorgs themselves, each taking two engine cars to transport their bulk by maglev. Dr Akagi, though, was staying in London-2; her presence needed for other work, and she was keeping all the trained Magi operators with her. They would still be supervising the operation, with use of one of the few satellites that the NEG could keep operational in the face of Migou orbital supremacy specifically granted for the mission.

From the air, the staging area appeared to be a normal New Earth Government Army and Navy forwards base. The dull greens, browns, greys and blues of the armed forces of unified humanity were in full force, the buildings themselves textured as to break out their outlines. The open spaces, textured with synthetic grass, had the outline of aerial launch chutes and missile silos; both fighter aeroplanes and warheads launched in the same style as the Evangelion. More conventional VTOL pads were present, ready to retract into the ground when the craft had landed. A single frigate, its blue-gray shell merging into the dark waters, was docked. Shinji frowned. He wasn't perfectly sure, given the state that he'd seen the last one of their kind in, but he was pretty sure that it was the same model as the one which had been cannibalised for the combat against Mot.

The place certainly didn't look like the staging ground for the assault on the largest single Esoteric Order of Dagon terrestrial holding. He guessed that was probably the point.

They landed, the pads immediately retracting underground, and as the back door lowered, Shinji took a deep breath of the cooler air. It tasted of arcologies here; slight hints of metal and human sweat blended in. He stumbled out, his bodyguards cutting ahead of him to clear a path, and sat down. The chair was blessedly unmoving beneath him; it felt good to just sit there for, hands in head.

_How is it that I can end up feeling worse after a simple flight than after a fully training session in Unit 01,_ he thought, self-pity creeping into his inner voice.

"Get up, Shinji," he heard Misato say. "Come on, it was only a little trip."

Grudgingly, he pulled himself to his feet. "I hate flying," he said to no-one in particular.

"I don't remember you getting so ill on the trip to C2," she said. "This one was only an hour or so."

"Yes, but that was a proper plane. Couldn't you feel it throb and sway as the A-Pods moved around?"

Misato's face darkened for a second, before returning to normal. "No, I can't," she said. "Former mecha jockey, remember? Now, come on. We've been assigned quarters for the night, and we need to get you changed for the meeting. Asuka, did you remember your uniform?"

"Of course," the red-head said. "Why would I forget that?"

"Good. Well, let's head down through this secret underground layer," she said jokingly.

Of course, things weren't that easy.

"What do you mean there aren't enough rooms?" exploded Misato down the phone.

There was a lengthy explanation, which didn't make much sense to her, but seemed to be based around the fact that Lieutenant Soryu had been given temporary accommodation with the Engel pilots (as a NEGA pilot of a synthorg), and it had been cancelled by the system LAI because they had no records of an Engel pilot with that name. Once again, the Limited Artificial Intelligence had lived up to its name.

"Well, can't you just, I don't know, kick one of the journalists or the other hangers-on out of their rooms?" was her suggestion.

Apparently, they could not. Misato put down the phone with a frustrated grunt.

"Okay. Sorry about this Asuka, but they're useless here. You'll just have to share with Rei, I guess."

Rei nodded. "That is acceptable. We are currently in the state known as 'friendship'."

Asuka flicked a glance at the other girl. "Can't I just sleep in your room instead?" she said to the older woman, trying to keep a whine out of her voice.

"No. As part of CATO's StratCom, I'm not actually getting any sleep for quite a while," Misato said, a tone of complaint entering her own voice. "I'm going to be up on EOE for the next few days. They didn't even give me a room; just a locker to keep my stuff in." She snorted. "I know why they do it; there's a lot more time in the day when you don't need sleep. It's just that I _like_ sleep. It doesn't ask anything of you. In fact, it's the second most fun thing you can do in a bed."

"And what is the most fun thing you can do?" asked Rei.

There was an uncomfortable silence, as three minds tried to parse the sentence, and wondered how she could possibly not understand the implications of the sentence in the highly liberated society of the NEG .

"Well, um..." began Misato.

"That was a joke," Rei added. "A form of humour. I checked."

There was a collective sigh of relief at the fact that they did not need to give The Talk to a sixteen-year old.

"Well, it wasn't very funny," managed Asuka weakly.

Shinji mentally agreed. The problem with Rei was that it was almost impossible to tell what she meant when there were ambiguous statements, or if she was being serious; the profound lack of body cues made it really hard. He had heard somewhere that 90% of all communication was non-verbal; a statistic he hadn't really believed, as it didn't make much sense. He still didn't think that they were accurate, but he was willing to accede that, after dealing with Rei, non-verbal communication was important.

"Now, come on. We need to get changed. The briefing begins at midday, and you three aren't ready yet."

~'/|\'~

"Ladies and gentlemen, I hope everyone is seated. Ensure that all your devices have a hard-wired link to the Alpha CPU, and that all potentially wireless devices are set to autistic mode. This includes implanted communication devices, hard contact lenses and even topical icons on clothing. All individuals are to wear AR-visors during this briefing; however, these must be the ones provided, which have been deemed security-compliant, and not any other ones (including implants). All sorcerers should have no active procedures upon their person, with the exception of those permitted by Section 119/a of the Applied Arcane Physics Control Act, 2086. Likewise, all individuals with parapsychic abilities should be wearing brainwave monitors, to ensure that any abilities are not activated during this meeting. Security will shortly be going around to ensure that all these criteria are fulfilled and protocols are in place. Breaches of these instructions will see prosecution under both military law and the Official State Secrets Act, 2089."

Shinji stretched inside the too-stiff uniform they had him wearing for this. Well, technically, it wasn't actually a uniform, as (as Asuka often reminded him), he was only a _Test Pilot_, and thus it merely looked a lot like one. As the Evangelions were strategic assets, along the level of a capital ship (especially with the new refits), it was important that they attend this briefing session, much as the captains of the ships to be used or the high ranking army officers had to. However, Misato, sitting on his right, in full military dress, had been quite clear to all three pilots that they were not to draw attention to themselves in this, due to quibbling little things that people would raise objections to, and so Rei and him were dressed so that they passed under the casual gaze as junior naval officers.

Very junior, in fact.

Well, actually, legally under-age officers. Asuka had received a special exemption from the Minister of War to receive her commission, and it really wasn't wanted that it become public knowledge that the NEG was using sixteen-year olds as frontline pilots. Hence, the fact was that the Ashcroft Foundation would really prefer that as few people as possible noticed anything amiss. If it had been possible, they would have tried to arrange it so that the pilots could just have watched from a video link, but the effort of securing permission to broadcast from an electromagnetically dead zone would have drawn more attention than sneaking the two civilian pilots into the room in clothes which looked _almost_ like they were uniforms.

"Is everyone ready? Yes? Good. As of 12:02 GMT, on the second of November, 2091, the unified strategic briefing session of the New Earth Government military Operation, codenamed CATO, is now in order. We will begin with a look at the relevent history, before moving onto a wide strategic view of the actual Operation, followed by closer examinations of the individual Task Forces involved."

The man cleared his throat.

"As you all know, the territory formerly identified as the nation-state of Iceland, prior to the Unification, was seized by the Migou in their second wave of assaults at the start of the Second Arcanotech War; the Fall of Iceland officially recorded as occurring in 2077." A vast AR three-dimensional map of Iceland appeared in the centre of the amphitheatre-like room, accurate from pre-AW2 satellite images. Before the watchers' eyes, the overlay (green, the colour of unified humanity) shifted to the red assigned to the alien Migou. Those sitting at the front with really good eyesight could even see the tiny Swarm ships and a few of their larger cousins move into the cities. Tiny plumes of smoke arose from the model.

"If we observe, the Migou proceeded to demolish the former human cities, and replace them with their own dwellings. Moreover, as the weather was more temperate than many other Migou holdings, they ended up with a sizeable population of both Blanks and Loyalists, who built their own settlements. With their typical thoroughness, the Migou and their subordinate forces built up their usual layered defences; mining the countryside and installing their biomechanical gun emplacements. Strategic Command, at that time, decided that any attack was not worth the inevitable losses we would take from attacking such a fortified territory, especially since the island remains relatively valueless. Iceland was deemed Low Priority for Reclamation, and the response tailored to prevent the Migou using it as a jumping-off point for further attacks."

The map changed, updating in a much lower resolution which showed the lack of information about a non-NEG territory. The speaker took a sip from a glass of water which sat on a table which, to onlookers, protruded out of the waters around Iceland.

"We now advance to March, 2082. Surprising both the GIA and, we believe, the Migou themselves, the Esoteric Order of Dagon launched a direct assault on Iceland. Casualty estimates were horrific, both among cultists and the large number of Deep One deployed, many of them wielding obsolete equipment, believed to have been what the species used to wage war before they stole arcanotechnology from humanity. However, we have had reports of multiple extra-normal lifeforms aiding the Order in their invasion, including at least nine different and independently verifiable instances of the exceedingly dangerous arcanobiological lifeforms classified as "Star-Spawn". This would at least in part explain the success of the Dagonites; the Star-Spawn are incredibly intelligent, often accomplished at sorcery (up to and including Yog-Sothothian Guards), and occupy a role in Dagonite theology akin to that of angels in Christian or Judaic mythology. Moreover, the attack, again if newly unclassified GIA reports are correct, was led by Dagon." There were gasps around the hall. "Yes, as in ''Esoteric Order of'' Dagon. To put this, again in mythological terms; as perceived by the cultists and Deep Ones of the Order, the attack was led by Jesus and accompanied by many of the major angels in Christian mythology."

Shinji shivered. From what he knew of the Christian legends, angels were meant to be incredibly destructive beings, often horribly alien looking (although some could pass for human), used to bring plagues and kill populations. He really didn't want to fight anything that could be compared to an angel.

A sudden wave of _deja vu_ struck him; something buzzing on the tip of his tongue. He shrugged it off, tuning back into the briefing.

_It's almost certainly nothing._

"Evidently Iceland was important to the Esoteric Order of Dagon. Strategic Command shifted up the priority for Reclamation, and there was indeed serious considerations of launching our own attack if only because they wanted it so much it couldn't be good, but in 2082, we were occupied in pre-Fall Russia and China, and indeed preparing our own assaults on Siberia from pre-Fall Alaska. The opportunity was missed, and the Dagonites," the map overlay changed to the light blue assigned to the Esoteric Order of Dagon, "dug in. They've been using it as their single largest on-land holding; Iceland is now more populated than it has been at any other time in history. Intelligence reports put the population at somewhere in the 20 to 30 million region, 85% of that clustered around the heavily populated pseudo-arcology of what was once the location of the city of Reykjavik. For the remainder of this briefing, we shall use the former, Icelandic names of locations, using our own code-names for places which had no equivalent, rather than use the Ry'lehan names that the Order has given to its conquests."

The map zoomed out, to include the surrounding waters. The landmass and the seas around the island were all the same shade of light blue, indicating uncontested control by one faction.

"This brings us to the current day, and Operation CATO. Now that this brief summary of recent history is complete (more information is available on your CPUs), we can continue to the main briefing. Operation CATO, as you have been informed, has as its goal nothing less than the Reclamation of the entirety of Iceland, with the liberation of the enslaved human population, and the systematic extermination of all elements possessing partially or completely inhuman ancestry. To these ends, we have four key operational areas determined; a task force from the forces present shall be assigned to each of these zones." Translucent boxes appeared on the map as he spoke.

"Task Force Scipio is tasked with the assault on the Reykjavik pseudo-arcology, which spreads out into the water as a submersed, Deep One city. This part has been deemed no use to humanity, and so will be demolished before the direct assault. Task Force Nero is attacking the northern urban area which we have named ''Tartessos'; the second largest population centre after the Reykjavak pseudo-arcology'. Certain activities which shall be conducted in this attack are classified even beyond the SANDALPHON classification of CATO; all those in Task Force Nero are to stay behind, for further details. Task Force Maximus will sail with Nero; however, their target is even further north. They will be conducting a direct assault on a Deep One city; we believe this is the nearest one to Iceland, barring the pseudo-arcology, and so its destruction will handicap any attempts to retake the island. Finally, Task Force Marcellus has the dual role of maintaining NEG air supremacy, and crippling infrastructure in the rest of the island, to prevent any attempts to move more forces to reinforce the targets Scipio and Nero are attacking. They will also be responsible for our deployment of nanological and micrological agents. Standard rebroadcast nanites will see use, as we know the band of frequencies their infantry use. In combination with the fact that we will be using MNB weapons, communications at the infantry and power armoured level should be crippled, giving our forces a notable tactical advantage."

He took another sip of water.

"Task Force Scipio is the largest of the battle groups by far; as it has to be to attack an entire pseudo-arcology. The attack will be headed by the 4th Mecha Corp and Battlegroup Legionary; as a heavy Engel-and-conventional formation and an amphibious naval capital assault force, their purpose will be to smash the defences and open up the area for the 21st and the 23rd Mecha Corps who will hold the beachhead and expand further into the pseudo-arcology, ensuring that no capital-grade stationary defences remain. When that has been accomplished, the troopships can be moved up. If you observe the AR projection..."

~'/|\'~

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the building, a specially selected group of the press corps were seated in somewhat spartan hall (in fact, it appeared to be a spare mess hall), waiting for their names to be called out to be briefed on why exactly they had been given an hour's notice to pack before they had been collected, to be taken to this area.

Under these circumstances, the only journalists who would be accompanying CATO would be the ones from Worldwide Broadcasting Organisation, the government-funded state media group. No private companies had been asked to provide reporters, on the advice of the GIA; even the higher echelons of the WBO had not been informed. Only those whose presence was actually required were had received high priority phone calls yesterday evening telling them to bring overnight bags.

Apparently in the past, right up to the First Arcanotech War, journalists were accorded status under international law which meant that they were not targeted by hostile forces. They could provide impartial coverage of the events of a conflict, even reporting news that was bad for the side which they were a citizen. Once, there were the glories of the free press, which could hold governments to account. Well, if they had once aimed for that ideal, they could not do so now. One of the more important skills for a modern war correspondent was knowing how to pilot powered armour, because neither the Migou, nor the Dagonites respected such conventions, and the Rapine Storm would not have, either, if anyone had been stupid enough to willingly report from _those_ front lines. Another one was having the strength of will to avoid fleeing in terror or gibbering in a corner when a ten metre high abomination tore through a wall and tried to eat the unit you were attached to.

Whole.

Journalists in the past had it easy, it was commonly agreed.

"Huh. Heya, Manapy. Haven't seen you since... Santander, wasn't it?" Antonio de Nebrija, from WBO Channel 2, said to the woman sitting opposite to him. He paused. "I think it was, anyway. Or were you covering the Eastern Front?"

She shook her head. "Nope. I haven't been doing any frontlines reporting since then." Her face took on a expression of remembered pain. "The fishmen had littered the place with mines. Proper anti-structure charges, too, not the old stuff they mostly used. Collapsed a building on us. Abany died; I lost an arm."

"Abany's dead?" said Varuata, Antonio's cameraman, shock in his voice. "Damn. _By seley hut ab werenti_," he added, slipping into Nazzadi. _Her soul will move on_, the words mean.

"_Ra ibitry_," Manapy replied. "It... wasn't pleasant." That was all that was said on the topic. "I then had three months in rehab getting used to the new arm." She pulled up her sleeve, flexing her fingers. "Took me almost a month to relearn how to do this properly."

"We've been lucky," said Varuata. "Nothing major; Antonio almost got his stupid head melted by an HPM, but it's not like it would have harmed him too much. Not much brain matter up there," he added with a smirk, tapping his head. "Well, apart from ruining his image."

Antonio waved his cameraman's comments off. "We had to get footage of the engineers setting up. It wasn't tagged as an active combat zone, after all." He nodded to the other reporter. "You know how it is."

"Oh yeah. I know far too well." Manapy added, "By the way, this is Tuwawa," gesturing to the whippet-thin man who sat beside her, reading quietly. He looked up, and waved, before returning back to it. "He's a photographer."

The man shrugged. "Yep. The WBO keeps quite a lot of us on staff, for something like this. Most of my stuff from this will end up being sold to the other media groups, though." He smiled. "I'm here to help us make a profit from the private groups, basically."

Manapy snorted. "I don't think any of us object to that." She cocked her head. "Hey, speaking of profits, did you hear? Luci Sougate is with Paradigm News, now."

Varuta nodded. "Yes, I've seen her. Guess the frontlines were getting too much for her."

"That's not quite fair," objected Antonio. "She quit frontlines a while ago. I kept in touch, though. They offered her a post as a senior commentator; I'd take it if Paradigm had offered it to me."

His cameraman raised his hands in mock shock. "And leave me out of work, on the streets, my children starving?"

Antonio sighed. "Varuta, your husband earns more than you do."

"That may be true," he chuckled, "but it hurts my case, so I demand that it be ignored!"

Manapy smiled. "No, it makes sense. Antonio can go work in safety, and you... you can become a lawyer."

"Oh, ha ha."

"I found it quite amusing myself, yes."

"Like I'd stoop that low, degrade myself that much."

A man, prominent white facial tattoos a stark contrast to his neat uniform, poked his head through the door. "WBO Channel 2, Group 3... uh... de Nebrija and Varuta. Please follow me for your briefing and assignation of combat zone."

The two men got up. "Well, it was nice seeing you again, Manapy. I'm sorry about Abany, though," said Antonio.

"Likewise." A bitter smile twisted her lips. "Especially the latter part."

Varuta added "It was nice meeting you...uh, Tuwawa, wasn't it?" The other man nodded. "Well, yes. Manapy, let's see if we can meet up after this is over and compare notes." He turned to his reporter. "Well, let's see what story they want to tell, and how we can best sell it."

"Yeh. None of us want another Juneau."

~'/|\'~

The strategic briefing had been going on for several hours now, and Shinji was struggling to retain interest. He was sure that Ken would have been enjoying this thoroughly (indeed, perhaps a little too much for it to be healthy), but he was not. Even the relevant parts of the strategic briefing, on Nero, were deathly boring, filled with military jargon which left him on the CPU before him trying to find what the words actually meant. He suspected that even Ken would have been bored by the minutiae of the tactics that the troops from the SWD (who were going to be supporting the Evangelions in their assault) would be carrying out. As far as he was aware, the role given to the Evangelions was simple; they were to march through the hole in the defences opened by the special operations troops, and a preliminary bombardment, and kill everything they saw that was shooting at them.

While it seemed to be something that he could handle, he couldn't really see the need for the Evangelions, as opposed to a conventional capital ship. Apparently, they had just given up on the pretence that he was merely a "Test Pilot", and were using him as a frontline asset. If that was the case, he was going to have another look at that contract that his father had him sign. He was pretty sure that they weren't allowed to do that.

Also, weren't you meant to have legal representatives or your guardian with you when you signed a contract? Shinji was pretty sure that you were meant to, especially when you were still below the age of 18.

_Oh. Right. My father was there. The bastard._

I wonder if he feels proud about tricking his own son into something that allows him to be used as a soldier.

He zoned back in. The briefing was coming to an ending, as the impenetrable morass of military terminology thinned. The questions from the floor had been especially bad; he hadn't even understood the questions, let alone the answers, although the green arrows which had appeared on the map in response were at least intelligible. It wasn't like how it was in films, at all.

"This concludes the strategic briefing for Operation CATO. All those not involved in the operations of Task Force Nero are now released. Please return all devices to the bins by the door, and do not reactivate wireless devices until you have left the EM Dead Zone."

The vast majority of the officers in the room filed out, now that they had received their briefing. A buzz of communication filled the air, the lack of an echo in the sound-proofed room altering the acoustics oddly; giving an almost metallic hum to the sussuration of voices. Misato could see the eyes of many of the passing members of the military flick to the ground of seats where the Evangelion members sat, the buzz intensifying as they passed the group. The black-haired woman winced internally, even as she kept her face professional and calm.

_Damn. I told them that the Children would be noticed if we took them into a proper briefing. Did they listen? No. The Project may have gone public, but everything about it is classified. Like the fact that we're using, _there were no two ways about it, _using teenagers as front-line soldiers._ She sighed. _I just hope they can run a proper damage control about it. It wouldn't be fair on Shinji to have to put up with the publicity. Much as Asuka might like it. I don't know what Rei would think about it; I _think _she understands the concept of "like"._

_That's not quite fair. She does have a personality. It's just not one that I understand._

Her eyes scanned the rapidly emptying room. Who else was staying? About a quarter of the group from the NEGN; those would be the naval units that would be providing fire support, plus the air units operating from those ships. Oddly, hardly anyone from the Army. That was very strange. Quite a lot of the representatives from the GIA; that didn't surprise her. The New Earth Government's intelligence service was one of the groups that had been pushing for CATO the hardest, according to the rumours she had heard. They were worried that too much attention on the Migou was permitting the Dagonites too much time to build up their numbers of Hybrids. After all, Hybrids took anywhere from thirty to seventy years to fully enter the water, so their "supply-lines" (it hurt to describe the atrocities which were the rape camps in that manner) were very vulnerable to disruption. Most of the representatives from the Ministry of War had left; only what looked like the highest ranking ones remained. And the Engel staff had left, too. What was going on?

And then she saw him, high balding forehead and short black hair over a set of thin, somewhat aristocratic features. The brainwave monitors which they had made all the parapsychics in the room wear was clutched around his skull like a metallic insect.

He was looking straight at her, and indeed gave a little smile of acknowledgement.

_Oh no. No. No. No._

What's he _doing here?!_

Misato felt her pulse quicken. Whether out of terror, anger, or something else, she wasn't sure. What she was sure of was that she didn't want to be in the same building as _him_.

Sitting on her left, Shinji noticed the change in his guardian's expression. Her face was locked into a mask of something unrecognisable; horrifically atavistic in the raw emotions that flash across it. His eyes flicked down to her hands. Even in the somewhat dimly lit auditorium, he could see blood swelling up from her palms, where her nails were digging into her balled fists.

"Uh...Misato?" he said, softly. This was worrying. He hadn't seen her this angry since... well, since Kaji had shown up for that meeting at Chicago-2. And even then, the emotions hadn't quite been this raw. That had been a human rage. This was something more primitive, deeper rooted. "Misato!" he said, a little louder. She still didn't respond.

The boy looked to his left. "Rei?" he said. "Uh, Misato's..." He trailed off. The white-haired girl was locked still; the muscles in her neck straining and her head actually shaking slightly with each pulse of blood through her arteries. He leant forwards, genuinely worried; a worry which only increased when he saw that her eyes were dilated to their maximum, her grey irises almost non-existent. "Rei!" he said loudly, getting glances from all around the auditorium.

The _sidoci_ turned her head, eyes shrinking back down as she focussed at him with one of her characteristic stares. "I am fine," she said, in a monotone which, if possible, was even more dead that usual.

Shinji paused. "Okay," he said eventually.

From behind him, he heard Asuka say, "Misato? Are you all right?"

Rei leant forwards. "She is fine. She is merely experiencing a series of extremely strong emotions. These include anger, regret, lust, existential terror, nostalgia..."

The emotionless words served, somehow, to break the woman's behaviour. Her hands relaxed, the blood from the cut palms oozing out onto her trousers, and she closed her eyes, eyelids still.

Suddenly, with incredible swiftness, she swirled to face the First Child, leaning forwards past Shinji to meet Rei's cold gaze with her own anger-filled stare.

"Get. Out. Of. My. Mind," hissed the Major, face reddening, fingers twitching as she slotted each word into place.

"I used no parapsychic abilities," replied Rei, in what approached a conversational tone. "It was merely observation. In addition, as you are aware, Major, I lack the ability to read thoughts. You have full access to this," she added, tapping the spider-like device that wrapped around her skull, "should you wish to confirm it, either way. "

There was an uncomfortable silence as Misato looked away first. Both Asuka and Shinji shuddered simultaneously, as they, only by its absence, did they notice that an odd static had been building in the air.

The sides of the mouth of the man, who had promoted that emotional response in Misato, inched upwards . He did not care that Rei had locked gazes with him; he met her stare and held it. The smile faded, his face becoming as impassive as hers.

A cough echoed around the amphitheatre-like room, amplified by loud-speakers. "Is this thing working... apparently so." A woman stood on the stage at the minute, a dark figure even in the light. She was an exceptionally dark-skinned Nazzadi, clad in an immaculately pressed black suit. The cut was such that almost no skin was exposed; the collar high and tight around the neck, a pair of white gloves poking out from her sleeves. She had no facial tattoos, no visible piercings, and her undyed black hair was the natural colour of her sub-species. Even with her straight in front of him, Shinji would have been hard pressed to describe her, so devoid was she of identifying characteristics.

"I am Director Khoury, of Special Services." That was all the identity she gave herself. That was all that was needed.

Special Services did not exist. It was not the penultimate branch of NEG authority, a black-books agency which was assigned to threats of a cosmic and/or metaphysical level. Their field agents were not almost, to a man, sorcerers and parapsychics, and they were not expressly given permission to ignore the NEG laws on summoning and binding extra-normal entities, consorting with Outsiders, use of parapsychic abilities on innocents, and registering their powers. They were not granted latitude to break the laws that even the OIS had to follow. The agency did not largely recruit from individuals arrested by the OIS, from among those who dabbled in the otherworldly and managed to remain both human and sane, and certainly did not subject them to extensive neuromodification, genetherapy and other illegal techniques developed in collaboration with top-secret Ashcroft Groups to ensure that they were both loyal and the best that they could be.

After all, Special Services did not exist.

They were, however, the men-in-black who conspiracy theorists whispered about and cultists dreaded.

"Operation CATO does not exist to reclaim Iceland," she stated, simply. "The island is not worth the resources we are committing here, especially since the Migou will, if our estimates are correct, reconquer the territory from us in three years, assuming median predictions. Neither is it worth the resources that the Esoteric Order of Dagon committed in 2082 when we look at what use they have made of the territory. They may have transformed it into a mature breeding colony, but the assets produced, with their thirty-to-seventy year maturation period, are not worth the costs they suffer from holding a territory so close to the Migou-controlled Arctic and our European territories. This has proven a long-standing mystery in GIA long-term predictions, and so our attention was drawn to it."

She took a deep breath.

"In 2089, we found our answer. We planted false evidence in Santander about Iceland, and leaked it to a local cult we knew was controlled by the Dagonites. The response was immediate and unexpected. The Order launched a full assault on the enclave, overwhelming the local defences. Only the fact that the aerial insertion specialist task force, Valkyrie, were undergoing repairs in the Barcelona Arcology, prevented the loss of the location. During the fight for the city, our agents managed to capture a number of high-ranking Deep One priests, including one of the direct subordinates of the Star-Spawn leading the assault. When the subject was... well, subjected, to neurovivisection, we found that the Esoteric Order of Dagon believes that there is an exceptionally powerful entity under either bound or sleeping under Iceland. If the mythological and esoteric correspondences are correct (and we believe them to be so, with a high degree of certainty), the Order is correct. And they are attempting to either bind or summon this entity, which we have, under the Andrianov Protocols, code-named ''Moloch''."

The map in the middle of the room reactivated, but the focus was different this time. It was not centred on Iceland, but instead _under_ Iceland, thousands of kilometres below the surface.

"To be blunt, we believe we have found the resting place of an example of the sub-group of entities, which, also under the Protocols, are referred to as ''Heralds''. You are reminded that the Andrianov terminology is to be used consistently in any discussion of this operation."

Shinji gasped. He was not alone in doing so, although he did note that the lack of reaction from Misato suggested that she had already known.

_They've... actually found one when it's not trying to kill us._

Well, I suppose that's why they wanted the Evangelions. They want us to kill it. But it looks like it's living in molten rock! That's impossible! Nothing could live down there!

He belatedly remembered that Heralds laughed at little things like "impossible", and went far beyond it. And groaned as a terrible thought struck him.

_... they're going to want us to go swimming in lava, aren't they?_ He frowned. Could you even swim in lava? Wasn't there some kind of problem? Beyond the obvious, that it was molten rock, something about densities?

He wasn't sure.

The black-suited woman at the front continued. "When we knew where to look, examination of old records, back from just after the discovery of A-Theory, showed an oddity roughly 2900 kilometres down, right at the base of the Icelandic Plume. With modern Arcane Theory, and knowledge of the performance of the extra-normal phenomenon known as the AT-Field in empirical conditions, it was found that it matched the theoretical description of a low strength AT-Field, with a maximum, roughly circular, cross-sectional area of around 8000 square kilometres, or, to put it another way, a circle with a radius of about 50 kilometres." The woman paused, red eyes scanning the on-lookers in the mostly emptied auditorium. "The interaction between this AT-Field and the boundary between the core and the mantle is, we believe may be what produces the Icelandic Plume. It matches several prophecies, even through they're veiled in primitivist mythology. To put it another way, Iceland only exists because of the target's presence"

There was utter silence in the room. This was a high level briefing. Most of the individuals present knew a little of the extra-normal history of the Earth in vague terms; that wars more suited for science fiction had been fought between non-terrestrial beings before the most recent common ancestor of the mammals and the reptiles had lived. But such a scale; that there was an ancient, inhuman being up against the very core of the planet, whose presence had shifted geology, was extremely disconcerting. Compared to the constancy of such a thing, asleep for hundreds of millions of years, the surface of the Earth flowed like water, mountains growing and eroding like ripples of water on a lake.

It made humanity look very unimportant. Short-lived and unimportant.

"Despite the magnitude of these finding, it still remained low priority, because none of the prophecy-deduced criteria for its awakening had been fulfilled. Assuming it was the cause of the plume, it has remained in its current location for between 58 and 66 million years." The woman sighed, a somewhat forced, almost mechanical noise. "And, no, we do not believe that it came to Earth in the KT meteorite, before anyone asks. It is possible, however, that it may have chosen to hibernate in the aftermath of that event and the mass extinction that had followed. Perhaps it can only maintain activity while it has worshippers which permit its higher dimensional body to cause a projection into the World of Elements. Perhaps the asteroid was the work of non-terrestrial intelligences, in a targeted strike against it. We are merely speculating here. The point is, there is a Herald-class entity down there. And with the recent appearances of other such beings; the one identified as Asherah on the 19th of August, Kathirat on the 25th of September, Mot on the 5th of October, Yam (that one appeared to attack Chicago-2 itself) on the 12th of October, and Shalim-Shachar on the 18th of October, it has been felt that we can not tolerate the possibility of it waking. Especially since it appears that the Order of Dagon is attempting to either control or ally themselves with it. Bluntly, that is unacceptable.

And so we in Special Services managed to persuade High Command that our worries about the Esoteric Order of Dagon were founded. From occult calculations, the next lesser conjunction which would permit the release or awakening of this entity at full strength is at 07:29 GMT, on the 13th of November, although it is possible, that it could be summoned within up to two weeks, either side of the date, with a corresponding lack of awareness and power. It would be still potent, but much reduced; almost half-dead, were the ritual to be carried out then."

The Director left a suitably melodramatic pause.

"So that's exactly what we are going to do. Task Force Nero exists to punch a hole through the Dagonite lines, doing as much damage as possible while the Evangelions move to secure the ritual site. We intend to take the Herald alive. Such an achievement would be, in the long run, a potential turning point in the Aeon War. Quite apart from the fact that we would have subverted the Dagonites plan and stolen it for ourselves, the things that could potentially be learned from such a being are, quite frankly, astounding. Where they're coming from. What they want. A way to kill them all."

A sussuration arose among the audience, from those who had not been informed of this beforehand.

"Special Services will deploy specialised sorcerers, once the site of the ritual is found, and carry it out as soon as possible, to ensure that the creature is as weak as possible when it wakes. Should that fail, the Evangelion Units will be on hand to terminate the target, as they have all previous such beings. Should that fail, Special Services has the authority to deploy unlimited-yield nuclear weapons in order to see the destruction of a Herald-type entity."

The AR projection disappeared.

"CATO is just a cover-up for Nero. We will succeed in this, or the damage done to our strategic, global position, will be cataclysmic."

~'/|\'~

The four friends were back in Major Bikija's quarters. There was silence, until the door was closed.

"You saw them?" asked Bikija, running a hand over his shaven scalp.

Captain Jolery, of the _Wuveni_, nodded, her once jet-black hair now an iron grey. Her destroyer was named after one of the vessels, originally of the Nazzadi invasion fleet, which had been destroyed in the desperate battles at the start of the Second Arcanotech War, where the Navy had almost been completely destroyed in its failed attempts to maintain orbital supremacy. "It's... disgusting," she said, finally, in a thick Nazzadi accent. "They looked to be in their mid-teens, _iyol dwa destrayi_," she swore. "It is not right."

"Very much," interjected Lieutenant Colonel Natasha Putin. She snorted. "I'm just glad that they've been assigned to one of the secondary assaults. I wouldn't want a teenager in charge of a capital-grade unit, full stop. I _really_ don't want a teenager in charge of a capital-grade unit right behind my battalion." There was a collective shudder all around.

Bikija winced. "At least your troops have a chance of surviving if they panic and shots go stray. You think my boys' powered armour is going to hold up to the lightest weapon that something that size is armed with? What the hell are they thinking, putting children in that kind of situation?"

"That's actually a point," Jolery said, her eyes narrowing. "How exactly are they packing capital grade firepower into something that small? I've made my way up, and I've commanded frigates." There was a pause, in which the others looked at her, waiting for the woman to make her point. She sighed. "Frigates which couldn't throw out that grade of firepower. Frigates which were 170m long. What I'd like to know is, _dwa jerunta_ are they fitting in that kind of weaponry into a forty metre tall mech?"

The final and youngest woman in the room, the missile officer on the _Unity_, finally spoke. "That's actually a real problem," said Yukwiny. "How are _they_ getting the power?"

"It's got to be some kind of improvement in the D-Engine. It's got to be," said Natasha. "They can't be just devoting more mass to engines, because there's some kind of problem that happens when too many get too close together." She frowned. "I wish we had an arcanotechnician here who could explain it. I'm not sure I remember it right."

"No, there's some kind of problem," confirmed Bikija. "Not I understand it, but there's some reason." He smiled wryly. "I'm neither smart nor insane enough to understand it, though."

There were snickers.

"But did you see the other problem. I think it's maybe more disgusting, if it's happening", continued Yukwiny. "The only reason I'm not considering resigning is I don't think it could be true. I mean, they wouldn't let them do it. There are laws."

Jolery frowned. "I know. Those things are much bigger than normal Engels. What are they using underneath?"

The only human in the room, a survivor of the Fall of Russia, nodded. "I've worked with Engel formations before. The things they use would only come up to those things knees. The largest ones, too."

Yukwiny sucked in air through her chisel-like teeth. "Actually, not that." She paused. "Listen to yourself. You're worrying about the smaller stuff. None of you are asking yourself _how the fuck_ the SWD got its hands on an entire Corps of troops trained to a high level and fully proficient in powered armour and those "Heavy Armour" units that they mentioned."

There was silence.

"A Corp?" said Bikija, finally, breaking the hush. "Might it just be an experimental training unit?"

"Yeah, I bet that's what they want us to think. But, an entire Corps? Not likely. That's far too big for a 'training unit'. "

There were noises of discontent from around the room, as they thought it over.

"Maybe the troops don't really exist," suggested Natasha. "That's the most logical suggestion. They're a cover for a GIA op; some kind of special forces thing."

Jolery nodded. "That's sensible, yeah. I could see that happening. If they're doing something big... and it'd have to be big, if they're using prototype things like those Eva-Engels things, then," he shrugged, "maybe it's higher clearance than even the rest of the operation."

"Higher clearance than Code SANDALPHON?" asked Bikija, doubt in his voice. "I don't think that really exists. That was just an excuse to get the other Task Forces out of the room."

"They just don't tell us grunts... well, us fairly high-ranking officers, nothing," joked Natasha.

Jolery continued, "Or maybe they just didn't want everyone to know exactly how powerful the Eva-Engels they're using are. If three of them can take down a place like that on their own, they're some kind of superweapon. I mean, _dwa jerunta_, my destroyer would get slagged by the number of capital-grade lasers they've got packed into the bay before I could get a shot off. I think they'd be a problem even for an Invictus-class. Not that they've even finished one yet."

Yukwiny's eyes remained narrow. "It makes sense, yes. I just don't like it. I don't trust the Ashcroft Foundation. And now they've got Engels and those Eva things; a proper heavy strike force. I don't like the fact that they're like some kind of major part of government, when they're just a private company. They shouldn't be able to have their own army."

Natasha shrugged. "That's just paranoia. If the NEG suffers, they suffer too. That's just common sense; they're not some evil group secretly trying to hold the world for ransom. We have enough of them in real life without making up more, although they mostly want to have us all worshipping extra-normal entities." She paused, her stomach rumbling. "Come on. If we stay cramped up in here, throwing ideas at each other, we'll go crazy. And I'm hungry. Let's find if there's a place in this damn base that does food that doesn't leave you feeling worse than before you ate it."

"There's always the default ration packs, you know."

The human raised her hands in protest. "It may be all right for you Navy types, with your fancy meals. Me, I'm not that desperate."

~'/|\'~

The clock on the PCPU on his wrist said that it was 23:27. He sighed, and let the arm flop back down.

Shinji lay on his back, staring up at the unfamiliar ceiling. The overhead light was still on, though turned down low. It was too dark in the room, otherwise. The darkness was everywhere, reminding him of how everything was just a paper thin layer over the... no! He wasn't to think like that! The world was real.

He yawned. Every time it looked like he was about to get to sleep, those thoughts, unbidden, began to creep back into his head. And so he had no choice but to stare up at the unfamiliar ceiling, the smooth surface identical to so many others in the vast base, hidden underground beneath a normal forwards position. There were so many people here; the three Children, left alone apart from the omnipresent guards, had found their way through their explanation of the underground coiling labyrinth, a spiral built around a central core (from which the capital ships would emerge when it came to move out). He, at least, had felt very young and small among this mass of soldiers and sailors and pilots. And there had been whispers, too; he had been sure of it, the quiet sussuration of hundreds of voices drawn towards something unusual and rare.

Misato had mentioned that they were trying to keep the Children's identities concealed. He was sure that was going to fail, that after this, any hope of a normal life would be gone.

_If you can call this a normal life_ he thought. _This time tomorrow, I'm going to be already drowning in something that tastes too much like blood for comfort, inside an arcanocyber... arcanomechabiological... part-flesh, part-machine robot, to kill cultists and fish-men, so that we can stop the fish-men from summoning an ancient creature that lives up against the planet's core. And we're stopping them from doing it so we can summon it ourselves. So we can capture/kill/kill with nuclear weapons it._

When he put it like this, the whole thing sounded insane. By past precedent, though, plans which sounded insane actually had a remarkably good success rate when the Evangelions were involved.

Shinji was fairly sure that he wasn't usually this cynical.

_Wow. This might be how Dr Akagi feels all the time._

But less crazy.

And, eventually, just as the clock bleeped quarter to midnight, he drifted off to sleep.

~'/|\'~

**3rd November, 2091**

The thundering of the train beat out a staccato rhythm in the dark tunnel.

And that in itself was unusual, as Shinji had only ever seen old-fashioned trains in films. The noise he associate with a train was the quiet hum of an A-Pod propelling it over the magnetic rails, and that only if you were near the engine.

The inside of the train, despite the anachronistic method of movement, was perfectly modern, a duplicate of an ArcTransit carriage, the mainstay of the mass transit systems of the arcologies. Well, lit, with comfortable seats. This one was clean too, the pale blue floor and white walls spotless.

He looked through the window. Outside, it was pitch black. No, he thought. Pitch wasn't like this. This was too dark, a Stygian night which filled all around the train like an oil made of the concentrate essence of the night sky, that utter darkness that was only given by gazing into eternity.

The wall of the tunnel was less than a metre away. Who could have known that eternity could be encompassed in such a small length?

He did. He was sure that he'd seen it before.  
Instinctively, Shinji knew that the darkness... the dark walls were malevolent. No, that was not the right word. Malevolence implied intent, a care for what might be done. Malevolence required sapience.

Call it anathema, then, if you were to apply the futility of human labels to such a thing. But no label, no tag could truly describe that which ran less than a metre from the glass against which Shinji Ikari had pressed his face, the beat of the tracks a pounding rhythm that filled his head and matched his heart.

He pulled his face away from the glass. No breath marks were left on the glass, despite the temperature on the train, akin to that of a cool autumnal day. Curiously, he reached out one blue-grey hand and and poked a finger through the glass, which proved to be nothing of the kind, a fractured network of arachnid threads that shone like illuminated diamond. With one clean movement he tore through the shining lattice, and tensed his legs, ready to throw himself out into the darkness.

He blinked twice, a haunting sense of deja vu pressing against the back of his skull. His hand rested flat against the glass, pale skin the only point of contrast against a dark background.

_What is going on?_ he thought, with a strange lucidity that overlay the rising panic. _What is going on? What is going on? With the hand... and the window... and everything. Why I am I here?_

He had to keep away from the dark. The dark was evil... strange... wrong, in every possible way. And he'd seen it before.

He looked up and down the carriage. At one end, to his left, the number '25' was illuminated in scarlet. At the other end, its twin read '26'.

The staccato beat of the train grew louder and louder, faster and faster, synchronised with his heartbeat so that he could not tell where one began and the other ended. As the train sped up, his heart thumped louder and louder, for such speed merely took him faster and faster into the unknown (and, indeed,unknowable), rushing through an eternity of void-wrapped tunnels with no way of seeing what lay ahead.

Or was the train speeding up as he grew more afraid, the terror that now gripped his body and mind empowering this strange place?

Or was there no difference? Was he the train, running into darkness, no clue of what lay ahead?

No. He wasn't. This was that dream again, he realised, a sudden moment of clarity rushing into his head. Every time he'd done this before, every time he'd woken screaming silently, every panic-stricken mindless flight came back to him. He was never going to repeat this cycle of fear and darkness, if he could stop it.

In fact, it meant he was making progress, according to the Ashcroft psychotherapist. One of the important steps in ridding yourself of recurring nightmares was realising that they were recurring nightmares, and thus escape from the script. They couldn't hurt you, after all.

It was probably for the best, all in all, that Shinji hadn't been told that there were indeed nightmares that hurt kill you, where the goetic nocturnal wanderings became lethal when the mind strayed into the devoured remnants of the Dreamlands. But in this case, ignorance was bliss, and indeed safety, as knowledge of such things increased the chance of their occurrence.

He had made up his mind, though. He was going to stay here, in this carriage, until the dream stopped. He wasn't going to flee through the doors, through an endless repetition of 25 and 26, because he knew where that ended. Shinji noted too, that as he calmed down, the train slowed. Carefully, controlling his breathing, he sat down in the middle of the floor, and waited.

The boy wasn't sure how long it was before the whispering started. There was no way to keep track of time, and it seemed he wasn't wearing his peek. The words were indistinct, hushed resonances which echoed in a way that, if the dream had been internally consistent, they really shouldn't have. The cadences were unfamiliar, soft, and, he was pretty sure, female.

He closed his eyes and tried to stay calm. Perhaps if he could get calm enough, it would stop, and he could get off.

_To where?_ a voice in his head asked. _To the darkness outside? At least the train is safe, even if it isn't real._ With a shock, he realised it was his own, from his own mouth, and the realisation sped the clattering beat up again.

And the door behind him, the one marked "26" hummed open, red light spilling out, so that his body cast a long, dark shadow in the crimson illumination.

His heart beat sped up again, and the train ran ever faster. He wasn't going to look, though. This was obviously the dream trying to get back on track, forcing him to flee.

Shinji concentrated on breathing, one deep breath followed by another; in and out, in and out.

He heard a soft footstep from behind him, a pause, then another; the flap of skin on solid ground. Another one. Then another. Getting closer and closer as they did, accompanied by the whispers, the female voice remaining indistinct even as it got louder.

A shadow emerged over the shoulder of his own shadow, hair hanging loose around an unseen face. Hyperventilating, Shinji began to whimper, the terror almost overwhelming. But he would not look! Ignorance was better! He wouldn't be having the nightmares if he hadn't seen that terrible coruscating blackness, which writhed in its stillness and painted the dark shades of an imaginary and non-existent rainbow over the back of his retina.

He would not look!

A cold hand touched him on the shoulder...

... and gave him a moderately hard push, rolling him over to the side. The boy curled up into a foetal ball, too scared to even scream, and then realised that he was lying down. On a bed. In a room that most certainly wasn't a train carriage.

The bed bounced, as someone else climbed in beside him, cold legs brushing up against his. When he shivered and flinched away, they were expansionist in their imperialism, claiming the newly vacated territories for their own. The hot breath against his neck, rapidly slowing and becoming the regular breaths of the unconscious, was a contrast to that, and yet annoying in its own way. It would have woken him up, if it hadn't been for the nightly terrors it had interrupted, and for that, he was almost pathetically grateful. It was worth a few minor inconveniences to be freed from the terrors of his own sleeping mind.

But he remained scared; irrationally so. The adrenaline and sweat from the nightmare did not go away that easily, and morbid thoughts continued to pass through his mind. What exactly had climbed into bed with him? Uh, he meant 'Who?'. Not 'What?'. Because of course it had to be a person.

He turned, eyes clamped almost shut.

Asuka's face, one eye half-open was what faced him. He looked down. Asuka, in what looked like a very lose shirt, which showed a remarkable amount of cleavage, had climbed into his bed.

Shinji froze.

She didn't look like she was awake, despite the fact that an eye was open. He waved a hand in front of her face; she didn't track it. Okay, she slept with an eye partially open. That didn't make sense. That had _not_ been what he was expecting. He wasn't sure what he had been expecting, but that hadn't been it. Come to think of it, he hadn't been expecting anyone to climb into bed at all.

Oh. That made sense. He hadn't woken up. He'd just managed to break the nightmare. This must still be a dream, right?

Right?

He looked back at her face. In the greyness of the dimly lit room (had she turned down his lights?), she looked different. Softer in repose, perhaps. Oddly unAsuka-like. Her hair was loose, trailing down over her shoulders, one strand, a darker shade of grey in the night, hanging down across her face.

She really was attractive, Shinji thought. Oh, he was aware of it normally, but this was different. Removed of her force of personality, the beauty because more vulnerable, and somehow much younger.

Those lips looked very tempting.

Shinji blinked and swallowed, unconsciously running his tongue over his lips. She mimicked the action, leaving her own lips glinting in the traces of light in the room. He ached to lean in and kiss her, the body overriding the reluctances in his mind.

He closed his eyes, and leant forwards.

He would have done it, too, had Asuka not whispered, softly, "_Mama_."

The words, so soft in cadence, nevertheless chilled him, and he pulled back; a Caesar afraid of the Rubicon. Stupid, stupid, stupid! What had he been about to do?"

"_Mama! Wer ist das andere Mädchen, Mama? Wie heißt sie?_"

Shinji rolled over, staring at the blank wall.

_She's just the same,_ he thought, as the bitter vitriol of self-loathing transmuted into anger which kept him awake for too long. _Just another Child._

By the time he woke up in the morning, she was gone.

~'/|\'~

Gendo Ikari climbed down the ladder, down to the ORACLE chamber, for its morning check. He was dressed only in an undyed cotton jumpsuit; an anonymous garment which would be destroyed as soon as it was removed. Even his characteristic glasses were gone.

The need for electromagnetic isolation for the ORACLE was that great. All the power came from within, from the Class "A" D-Engine, most commonly used in capital ships; waste heat was disposed of through a carefully designed thermal superconductor which dumped the energy into the planet's mantle. Nothing could else be permitted to leave or enter the triple layer of insulating shells which lay underneath the Geocity. Not under _that_ bit of the subterranean arcology, of course; the security precautions there were even greater. But, nevertheless, the _other_ product of Project Magi, was both vulnerable and dangerous, for what it could know and what it was.

Only two people ever entered this room. Ritsuko did not know that this place existed; it had been designed by her mother, and Gendo had never felt it necessary to tell the younger Doctor Akagi about it. Even Fuyutsuki never came here, although that was more from personal fear than an actual prohibition. The old man was terrified of the ORACLE; he had made that abundantly clear to Gendo. Though he would use the data that it produced, he wanted nothing to do with the actual device.

The mistake that the Deputy Representative made was in assuming that the senior Ikari was not terrified by the ORACLE as well.

Who could not be?

The place was not lit in the actinic white of most of the other high security places. The blue lighting, almost painful in the way that it flickered at the edge of vision, shone down on unpainted metal tubes and wiring, all against the mirrored interior of the sphere. The shining white walls were absent entirely. The air stank of hot metal and gunpowder, that odour of utter, micromachine-enforced sterility.

The prohibition against sharp angles was still there, of course. For the ORACLE, such a restriction was particularly important. It was one of the most threatened by the things that would have used such an entry as a passageway into what the monkey-brain laughably called reality.

Gendo reached the bottom, and stepped away from the bars, flexing his shoulders as he undid the harness. He slumped down onto one of the hard chairs, and reached up, reflexively moving to sweep his hair to the right. He stopped when his hand hit the hard, waxy covering which had been sprayed on in the first airlock. Loose hair would have broken the sterility policies. Instead, he rubbed his head against one shoulder, breathing heavily. Although he wasn't in the same shape as he had been in his twenties (although, hells, who was once you got to this age?), he wasn't that unfit as to need a rest after such a short climb.

No, it was the burns. They were spreading, after another accident with ... with the object. The first thing to go had been the freshly grown skin, transplanted after the accident with Unit 00 back in August. It seemed so long ago, now.

He smiled faintly, irony twisting his features into a self-mocking grimace. A lot had happened since then.

It was more severe on his left arm than his right. On the right, it had only fully covered his hand, the surges of things that man was not meant to play with leaving streaks of necrotic flesh, like claw marks, running up his arm. The left was worse. He had looked at it this morning, and had thrown up as the scent of rotting flesh and... other things clawed at his nostrils.

_I'm sorry, Yui. I cannot keep it like this. I will have to rest for a while to recover. Graft more flesh on. You might have been able to keep on. I can't._

Sometimes he liked to think that she talked back to him, in the ORACLE room. He knew that was only a self-delusion. Yui Ikari had not even known about ORACLE, although she had provided some of its vital components. No, the real reason he came down here, sometimes, Gendo admitted to himself, was for the silence. And the guarantee that no-one was listening in.

He had been so _lonely_. For twelve years. There had been other women, yes (and a lot of them, if he were to admit it to himself); they had talked about it before... it had happened. She had given him her permission, just as he had given her his.

But they hadn't been _her_. They hadn't been his Yui.

He sat for a while, his heavy, pained breathing the only noise. The D-Engine was silent, and the conventional processors in the ORACLE were swathed in superfluidic helium, kept only a few microkelvin above absolute zero, within the innermost sphere in the centre of the room. The platform on which he currently sat ran around the equator of the sphere.

And then, widely dispersed around the circumference, were the Nodes. Labelled from 003 to 024, they were the reason for the isolation. The core, at the centre, was similar to the conventional parts of 'just' another Magi-type supercomputer, which was to say, a machine less lethal and uncontrollable than an Evangelion. That was a bit of a relief for Project Group Evangelion. They were still dangerous, but the danger was more of a potentiality; what others (less responsible or well-intentioned than himself, Gendo thought, with only a trace of irony) could do with them, and their raw computing power.

But the Nodes. The Nodes were special.

Dangerous.

Unique.

And useful. So very useful.

Of course, the masses of useless text generated by the Nodes, flicking through hideous amounts of data fed to them, was fed into the Magi-like component of the ORACLE

But this cycle had been different. All twenty-two Nodes had only produced three words. Three identical words.

THE MOTHER STIRS

Gendo stared at the words, as if they would disappear if he looked away. Perhaps they would. He tried it, as an experiment; they remained visible and consistent.

This was worrying. Such a degree of correlation had never been seen before on the ORACLE.

_But what does it mean? There are far too many entities that could be described as "the mother" for any single action to be taken._

And so he began to prepare for the worst, even as he hoped for the best.

~'/|\'~

Shinji sat, nursing a cup of caffeinated tea. Actually, the tea was surprisingly not-bad, which wasn't, by any means, the same as being good. He took a sip. English was rather odd in those regards, as a language. You would have thought that "not-bad" was the same as good. Yet this tea most certainly proved that this was not the case.

He still took another sip, though, and glanced over at Asuka.

He hadn't said anything to her yet. Well, he hadn't really had the chance. It was only breakfast, after all; a fairly late one at that. The Children were not needed for anything in this final run up, and so merely had to report to the place that Misato had told them when she sent the message. Rei was not here, and so it was only him and Asuka, sat alone at a table while the stream of other adults through the feeding hall packed themselves onto crammed benches.

He could feel the eyes on him, by the way that the hair in the back of his neck stood up. It was putting him off his food, the attention from those individuals who could see that they were too young-looking. Especially him.

It was enough to induce a case of severe paranoia.

Putting down the cup, he poked at the porridge. It was a carefully engineered meal, designed to provide a perfectly balanced diet for individuals subjected to combat-levels of stress. It was also, because he hadn't been eating it fast enough, cold, with roughly the same consistency as mucus. Shinji forced himself to take a spoonful, and swallow, rejecting the gag reflex.

_Why did I get this, anyway? I don't even like porridge!_

Asuka fixed him with a stare. "Go ahead, eat it. You'll let it get cold."

"It's already cold," he said, wincing.

"Well, that's because you're an idiot and didn't eat it fast enough," she said heartlessly. "Honestly, you should make it more at home. It's proper food."

"But it's so bland."

"Blandness has its place. Unless you're some kind of overstimulated fool who can't tolerate things which aren't brightly coloured."

"Just wait a moment," he retorted. "You've said my clothing is boring before."

"Well it is. Pretty much everything is black, white, or some shade of blue, and you don't even have much with topicals on them."

"And you don't see any kind of... well, contradiction between the two statements?"

Asuka shook her head. "Nope. Because this is me, and that is you."

The unashamed hypocrisy left Shinji somewhat breathless. And entirely impossible to come up with a response which didn't sound ridiculous.

Why wouldn't she chose how she wanted to treat him? They could get along passably, and then he'd do something, or say something, and she'd start belittling him. Were all girls this complicated to be around?

Nevertheless he was going to push his luck, in pursuit of information. "Asuka?"

"Yes?"

"Why did you..." he coughed, "um... come through to my room last night?"

He saw her freeze. "What are you talking about?" she said cautiously,which in itself was a dead give-away.

"You woke me up when you pushed me over," he said, staring at her face for the subtle cues. This wouldn't work on Rei, he idly thought, before he brought his mind back to the subject at hand. "Why did you get into bed with me?"

"Don't say it like that!" she hissed back at him, looking around for anyone who might be listening.

"But it's true."

"Not in that tone of voice, it isn't!"

"Fine." He thought. "Why did you come though?" he hazarded.

Asuka looked away, blushing slightly, before staring back at him. "If you must know, it was because I couldn't sleep. It's that... well... Rei snores. Really loudly."

Shinji dropped his spoon. It landed with a splat. He worked his mouth a few times. "Really?" he finally managed, incredulously. "That's it?"

Asuka nodded. "Yes," she lied.

~'/|\'~

"Ah, Malia. You're back. How was the experience?"

"Oh, very interesting, Anton. Very interesting indeed. I can definitely see why you wanted me for that."

"You saw her?"

"Yes. The resemblance is uncanny. Although where _that man_ is involved, I think I've ceased to be surprised. Do you think there is anything he hasn't considered in pursuit of his goals?"

"You have the samples."

It was not a question.

"Oh yes."

"Good. We'll see what they show."

"From my observations, I don't think that the thing we feared has happened. Yet."

"That, at least, is something."

~'/|\'~

Director Alice Wade, of Project Group Herkunft, stood, staring out over the deployment chamber. From above, it resembled nothing more than a giant circuit board, a hierarchical network of interlinked components. And perhaps that was what it was.

The lesser components were in place. Now it was time for the... comparatively risky part. Not that anything was going to go wrong, she reminded herself; the trinary kill-switches were in place. In case of an emergency, the Secondary Commander could be cut from the network, the command protocols they were implementing routed through the other Secondary Commanders and the Primary Commander, Subject Perseus himself. And if that failed to remove the components functionality and they moved to a cascade incident, or, even worse, a synchronicity incident, the kill-switch would become literal.

"Director Wade," the man beside her asked, licking his lips, "we require your authorisation to initialise the Secondary Commander Components."

Almost absent-mindedly, her gaze drifted to his slicked-back hair. It wasn't natural hair, she could see; the man had obviously had a scalp transplant to get it that shade of red. Especially when she took his Hispanic ethnicity into account. Unless he dyed it, of course, but it looked too natural, too good for that to have happened. It was funny the way the overhead lights, dimmed as they were looking through a one-way mirror, shimmered as he shifted.

Alice realised what she was doing, and removed the AR glasses she was wearing, massaging the bridge of her noise with sweat-slicked fingers. She had been wearing these glasses for too long, through this entire set-up procedure, and now negative images were dancing in front of her eyes, of the data-files and system linkages of the floor below in superposed red and blue.

Some people were able to wear AR glasses all the time, without eventually getting distracted and getting headaches from the immaterial solids that they displayed. She wasn't one of them. It was an annoyance.

"Are the spinal PT-diodes all functioning?" she asked, for the fourth time today.

The man nodded. "They're all green."

"And there are no immune responses to the most recent additions? No inflammation or fall in transmittance for C1, C2 or C6?"

There was another nod, this time with perhaps a hint of exasperation. "No. Remember, these five subjects have already had more spinal PT-diodes fitted than any of the other candidates. If they were going to have had an immune response, it would have happened before now."

"Yes, but we can't be certain," she snapped back. "Are you aware... of course you are, Barriso. You know damn well what would happen if one of them died in TAC start-up." She paused, realising that she was almost shouting. "I'm sorry. I'm a little tense, especially with that," she looked around, "that harpy from the SWD nagging on and on."

One of the individuals seated at the computers around the room raised their head. "The Perseus team requests a status update," he said. "They want to know why there hasn't been Paragon authorisation yet."

There was a grimace, as he ignored the interruption. "I think everyone is a little stressed out, Director," he replied. "Yes, to pre-empt your next question, the cerebral enhancements also remain stable. The refined neural implants from Project Group Achtzig are actually much smaller than the old Magi-type ones; we actually had to pad them out. Dr Sylveste has done a wonderful job with them. We're probably near the limit of what we can fit into a skull with modern electronics, without a specialised heat dissipation system. We could fit more in, but they'd just cook the brain."

A younger woman, stress-related streaks of white through her fizzy light brown hair, poked her head in the door. "Are you talking about the DTAIN?" she asked.

Barriso nodded his head. "Yes," he said to the Deputy Director of one of the subordinate projects in Project Group Herkunft. Of course, the term "subordinate" only referred to their status compared to the titular project, Herkunft; Project Harbinger was still of great importance. He lowered his voice. "Dr Schapira's been gushing over them for a fortnight," he added to the Director, in a lowered voice. "I'm getting a little sick of it."

"Well, you don't have to listen, then," she called out, coming into the room properly. "I'm allowed to gush over them. They _are_ amazing." She paused, folding her arms in front of her body. "Anyway, I've come to, well, sort of off-the-record, suggest something to Dr Wade."

Barriso glared at her. "Yes, and we're in the middle of start-up for the first mass combat deployment of the Project Eidelon troops. Can't it wait?"

The Deputy-Director of Project Harbinger stared at the Director of Project Eidelon. "Well, it's actually about one of our best animaneurobiologists being stolen..." she paused, "sorry, I meant, transferred to Project Schicksal. It's widely know that we're almost totally dependent on ANBs to find Harbinger candidates, and Project Harbinger as a whole certainly objects to the removal of such an asset. Especially when Jakaya won't even be moved to another pure Herkunft group, but instead isn't going to be available at all, thanks to the damn necromancers at the Amunet Group and their secrecy!"

Dr Esther Schapira paused, panting. She'd probably gone over the line there, but she didn't care. Harbinger may be getting overlooked due to the recent (eventual) success of Paragon, Eidelon and Perseus, but it was Harbinger which could reliably produce stable parapsychics, who were starting to be rolled out everywhere in very limited numbers, from the Task Forces to Ashcroft Public Relations and Legal.

"Another time," snapped Dr Barriso. "We're in the middle of something. And," he retorted, "don't think I've forgotten when your superior poached one of _my_ best nanite programmers."

Dr Wade sighed. It was like dealing with infants, really.

_Ironic, that_, she though, with a sight twist in her mouth as she stared, back turned to the fuss behind her, out over the deployment chamber.

But, really, that was always the way with scientists. She knew; she was one. Get a bunch of very intelligent people together, most of whom had doctorates, and make them fight over scarce resources (which in the Ashcroft Groups took mostly the form of high end researchers and arcanoengineers, rather than money), fray their sanity through exposure to things that man was not meant to know, add in a few more people who saw _that_ as a challenge, and they suddenly have all the viciousness of the school ground sand-pit.

It was such a small, closed group, the really high-end research and development in the Ashcroft Projects, that it probably numbered around the size of the human monkey-sphere. About a hundred and fifty individuals, all competing for the same resources as each other, and all potentially able to carry grudges.

_And once again, human evolutionary psychology plays against us,_ Alice thought, bringing up a list of names and checking the numbers beside them on her PCPU. She glanced over her shoulder, where it had degenerated to the man and woman throwing past grudges at each other. It was made worse by the fact that those two had never got on; it was a generational gap, between the old school of Eidelon, started when parapsychics were exceptionally rare and it was all about making the Eidelon subjects cheaper and easier to control, and the younger Harbinger project, which saw less need for such things, able as it was to induce such powers in sensitive candidates.

"Enough!" she finally snapped. She'd been having this occasions more and more, recently; zoning out, trapped in her own thoughts so it almost seemed to others that she was in a fugue state. It was probably time to see if her PychEval counsellor thought it was time to up the dosage of the S-Kar blockers and antipsyanimics. There'd be time after CATO, certainly. Not now, not yet.

There she was again. They were both staring at her. "Esther, I'll consider your request, but Dr Pinda chose to take the position, as it would mean that he would get to lead his own team in a Project that has a fair chance, if they can get a success, in becoming a Group. Remember what all the Herkunft and Herkuft-derivatives are reliant on; we'd really like to find an alternative, even if it requires recourse to arcanoxenobiology. And we've been taking specialists from Projects Icarus and Eidelon; indeed, even some from the projects of the Engel Group." She paused. "We need to stop some of this petty rivalry between Groups." _Of course,_ she thought, _it would be nice if, oh, say, not pointing any fingers, Evangelion, would return the favour occasionally. Ritsuko._ Out loud, she said, "You are dismissed, unless you want to watch the activation, of course."

Esther indicated that she wanted to stay, and stepped closer to the viewing window.

"Philipe, I believe we were about to turn on the Secondary Commander TACs. I reviewed their LAAM and EMSS score, and I feel that I can safely authorise a TAC authorisation. If you feel that the Eidelons are ready."

Dr Barriso spared a smirk at Dr Schapira, before turning back to the Director of Project Group Herkunft and its titular Project. "Yes, Director Wade. I feel that they are. We have had repeated successes in the small scale tests after all, and we have performed successful large scale tests, before after all. Now we move onto full practical field testing."

She rolled her eyes. "Well, if we were to pull out now, the government and army would be exceptionally displeased with us."

"Understatement of the century, I'd say." He paused. "Well, actually, people have probably said worse things. Like, oh, anything to do with anything looking bad." He shrugged. "Well, here goes."

Director Wade coughed. "Do you want to say anything more... portentous? Or perhaps laugh evilly?"

He shook his head, an expression of slight offence appearing on his face. "I'd rather not. I do recognise that this isn't a good thing; it's just a necessary thing. And, anyway, I'd rather not be put a PsychEval high priority watch-list ... as I know I would, if I started doing things like that." A sour noted entered his voice. "And, on a more pragmatic note, we really don't want strong emotions anywhere near a TAC start-up. It might draw... unwanted attention."

Alice nodded approvingly. "Good. Go ahead, then."

The authorisation signal was given.

And the five Telesthetic Attunement Chambers in the chamber below activated, one by one; the amplifying components spinning in more ways than were visible, as they resonated in higher dimensional spaces.

"EM Double-Ess scores are skyrocketing," called out one of the staff on the main desks. "Fourth stage... fifth stage... sixth stage... seventh stage! We have seventh stage! LAAM are stable; 68 to 75... maintaining current rate."

"We have boot up from Eidelon," one of the Project liasons reported. "Brainwave activity from all groups."

"Running scans. ANB reports are showing a clean run."

"Eighth stage! Eighth stage!" A note of panic filled the operator's voice. "Subjects Orpheus and Jason are spiking! The wavepacket is being subsumed!" Above them, the lights flickered once, then again.

"Jason has stabilised back down at seven. Looks like it was a random fluctuation."

"Orpheus is borderline ninth... but falling."

"Please repeat, Eidelon. I did not receive. There's heavy static on the line."

"Get Orpehus back down! We can't support eighth stage!"

"Should we pull the kill-switch?" queried Philipe, his heart beating like a drum inside his chest.

"Stabilising! Stabilising! Keep those ratios under 1:1!"

"How are the LAAM scores?" shouted Alice Wade, clutching her head as a corona of red painted itself onto her eyeballs. All around the room, others were clutching their heads, as, above, the lights flickered.

"LAAM are stabilised... Orpheus is at 87, others are safe..."

"Orpheus is falling... 83... 80... 78..."

"Orpheus is back down to seventh stage... no, sixth... no, back up to seventh."

"Running stable, within normal parameters. Lowing TAC attenuation, now that the connection is made. Running in passive mode."

The babble of the operators died away, as everyone took a breath, and rubbed sleeves against sweat-slick foreheads. They were still alive.

Dr Esther Schapira was the first to speak. "Fuck. That was close." The Deputy-Director of Project Harbinger took a deep, shuddering breath. "If I'd known that you were going to almost have a cascade incident, I'd have left when I had the chance," she said, weakly; the poor humour a release in the stress-filled environment.

"Do you... is the subject displaying teratogenic characteristics?" asked Dr Barriso, somewhat more urgently.

A greater-than-life-size simulation of the test subject was bought up.

"Eyes remain normal, heart-rate is highly stressed, but within human limits, no changes to the epidermal layer. Uh... the TAC is interfering with normal animacerbral scans, so that can't be checked. We aren't getting the rapid fluctuations to neural morphology that Ayes suffer, though." The technician paused. "No obvious signs of any changes to the subject's biology. They're clean of Lilitu effects."

There were sighs of relief all around.

"If we deactivated the TAC, we could run a proper animaneural scan, properly check the soul for contamination," added the technician.

Dr Barrisso cocked his head. "Alice?"

She winced. "It's tempting. We know that the Sub-Commanders have always had elevated LAAMs, and I don't like the fact that she spiked up to almost a 1:1, and held it for a few seconds." The woman massaged the bridge of her nose. "It's going to probably add a few permanent points to the subject's LAAM. That's not good. Orpheus was already high."

"I'm surprised, I have to admit," added Esther. "We've had abominations most times we've spiked like that. It's really annoying when you lose a good candidate like that. I'd recommend, from my experience with Harbinger, that you disconnect that subject and run a full scan."

Philipe ran his hands across an AR display, putting a fresh overlay over the model of the subject. "Look. The scan from just before the activation; there isn't any change... well, beyond the elevated stress levels, but that's to be expected after a TAC activation. Yes, in the best world," he said, tucking an errant hair from out of his field of vision, "we'd do that. But the problem is that the activation is the riskiest part. It's where we lose people. At Harbinger, you just put them through the TAC once. We run them under attunement for extended periods, multiple times. We also really want to keep activations to a minimum; they're stressful to the subjects." He paused. "Has there been any response from Eidelon?" he asked his subordinate.

"Yes, Director," the younger man replied promptly. "It was a near perfect start-up. Even from the Hades group. Seems the spike wasn't transmitted down. We have full boot from... uh," he checked the datapad before him, "996 Icarus models. Three didn't respond; they're being checked... one died at Stage Aleph ASI."

"And the main Replica units?"

"We've... yes... we've got responses back. We haven't run a unit-by-unit check; these are just the biomonitor readings." He licked his lips. "I'm putting the numbers up on mainscreen."

The numbers were up there, clear, concrete, and amazing. And terrible, in the truest sense of the word.

_**Summary of Replica Start up:**_

_**Of 28, 215 Type VII Replica Units;**_**  
****Did not respond: 1,801  
Failed at Stage Aleph ASI: 110 (52 deceased)  
Failed at Stage Beth ASI: 907 ( 103 deceased)  
Failed at Stage Gimel ASI: 2,996 (993 deceased)  
Successful: ****24,202 Replicas have achieved pseudosapience******

_**Of 8,916 Type VI Replica Units:**_**  
Did not respond: 202  
Failed at Stage Aleph ASI: 42 (14 deceased)  
Failed at Stage Beth ASI: 19 (6 deceased)  
Failed at Stage Gimel ASI: 3 (3 deceased)  
Successful: ****8,649 Replicas have achieved pseudosapience******

_**Of 1000 Icarus "Assassin" Replica Units:**_**  
Did not respond: 3  
Failed at Stage Aleph ASI: 1 (1 deceased)  
Failed at Stage Beth ASI: 0 (0 deceased)  
Failed at Stage Gimel ASI: 0 (0 deceased)  
Successful: ****996 Replicas have achieved pseudosapience**

A cheer arose from the crowd, the staff of Project Group Herkunft proud in that which they had accomplished.

Alice Wade, however, made a small tutting noise. The Type VIIs were experiencing much higher fatality and failure rates than expected; they were meant to be more stable, for goodness sake. All those deaths in Stage Gimel, which was the activation of the higher brain functions and of the pseudo-consciousness instilled by the animasapience infusion; that was unlike every single model beforehand. The Type VIs were showing a rate and pattern of failure within a standard deviation of expectations; a little on the high side, but tolerable.

The Type VIIs were not. She shared a look with Dr Barriso.

Perhaps the spike had done more damage to their vat-grown, flash imprinted brains than they had thought.

~'/|\'~

_Die erste Elegie_  
**it hurts so much. pain is her existence, now. for a subjective eternity.**  
_Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel_  
**she floats, in darkness.**  
_Ordnungen? und gesetzt selbst, es nähme_  
**abomination! abomination!**  
_einer mich plötzlich ans Herz: ich verginge von seinem_  
**she sits on a swing, back and forwards, back and forwards. it is the last time she sees the real sky.**  
_stärkeren Dasein. Denn das Schöne ist nichts_  
**she screams as it happens, water and fire and pain and death and abomination and horror and fear and terror and panic and screaming and confusion and agony and cessation all brushing against her mind.**  
_als des Schrecklichen Anfang, den wir noch grade ertragen,_  
**my baby! give him back!**  
_und wir bewundern es so, weil es gelassen verschmäht,_  
**my babies! give them back!**  
_uns zu zerstören. Ein jeder Engel ist schrecklich._  
**all the death. so much death. over six times ten hundred hundred hundred hundred die, and she feels every one. **  
_Und so verhalt ich mich denn und verschlucke den Lockruf_  
**every one becomes part of her memories of pain**  
_dunkelen Schluchzens. Ach, wen vermögen_  
**and they keep on happening.**  
_wir denn zu brauchen? Engel nicht, Menschen nicht,_  
**they pulled the life support, eight years ago.**  
_und die findigen Tiere merken es schon,_  
**their pain is nothing compared to hers**  
_daß wir nicht sehr verläßlich zu Haus sind_  
**she will not die. she cannot die.**  
_in der gedeuteten Welt...._  
**why won't you touch me?**

~'/|\'~

"Colonel Rury, we have activity in the assets for the Ulysses mission."

The Nazzadi woman cocked her head. "Stable?"

The man nodded. "Yes. Three failed to respond, one dead." He paused for a moment. "Start-up confirmation for the rest of the subjects... start-up successes are still being counted, but it looks like it should be sufficient."

The woman sighed. "It took them long enough. I was afraid I was going to have to _ask questions_," she said. "I assume that the non-functional assets are being removed from the launch devices?"

The man looked slightly offended. "Of course, Colonel. The 3 non-responsive units were in a single batch; we're just redistributing the assets to ensure that Ulysses has its full complement. We're making up the short-fall from the Type-VI groups, as per standing instructions."

"Excellent." She gestured up at the projector in the centre of the room, the LAI monitoring all movement in the room interpreting the device as a specific activation code. "Switch to launch monitor," she commanded the room, which obliged, bringing up an AR projection of the fleet. It sat heavy on the water, a truly astounding concentration of force. There were other regions that would be suffering from the way that these assets were committed; forces across the southern hemisphere were being pulled back from the Migou and their incursions from Antarctica. There was always a price; always an opportunity cost. Everything was an exercise in choosing the least bad option.

And in this case, the assets provided by Project Herkunft were very valuable indeed. The troop ships were pregnant and bulbous compared to the knife-like warships, filled with their deadly cargo. Updated figures were coming through for successful activations. Accounting for the necessary reorganisations for squads that had to be merged due to unsuccessful reactivations, her subordinates were telling her that she had 996 Replica Assassins, 24,200 Type VII Replicas (9,880 in Heavy Armour, 8,720 in Powered Armour) and 8,640 Type VI Replicas (2,080 in Heavy Armour, 4,820 in Powered Armour).

It was truly astonishing. She had an entire Corp of superhuman soldiers under her command. They would not flee; they would only retreat if ordered to. They would not panic; the horrors that walked the Earth would not phase their pseudosapient minds. They had no mercy; they killed on command and the very concept of defection would not occur to them. And that was quite apart from the more terrifying Assassins, whose very existence, as infantry stealthed through technological means, was paradigm-breaking; even before their superlative abilities, even compared to their kin, were taken into account.

The Nazzadi was well aware the irony that she now supervised the deployment of a force better designed for the systematic genocide of another sapient species than her parents (whoever they had had been). And the systematic genocide of another sapient species was something that she intended to carry out to the best of her abilities as a military officer of the New Earth Government Army. She knew some of the lengths that had been gone through to produce these biological constructs.

That did not bother her.

She could not conceive how it could.

She opened a comms channel to CATO Command. "Colonel Rury of the NEGA SWD authorising launch of Ulysses assets from Fleet Erat. I repeat, I have confirmation that the Ulysses assets are loaded into their infiltration craft and are ready to launch in preparation for Operation CATO. The Special Weapons Division is removing the seal on tactical deployment." She began to rattle off her personal authorisation code.

"Launch as per operational instructions."

It was time to blind Polyphemus.

~'/|\'~

There was no great commotion as the Strix infiltration craft were launched. The one-engined, stealthed transports were fired from within the bulbous hulls of the troopships, accelerated along the rails (in a manner almost identical to the deployment method used by the Evangelions, back in London-2) until the fliers met the open air and the glider-like wings spread. For just a moment, they hung in the air, before their own A-Pods activated and the stealth fields flicked on. And against the early darkness, this far north, the slight distortions from the invisible fliers were almost negligible. They would drop their cargo just outside Target Delta, the city the Order called Dagon'uvtu Oraribyrapr, and then return back to the staging ground in the north of Scotland, the LAI pilot system taking no risks once the cargo was delivered.

Strix were fairly expensive, after all.

But as the products of Group Herkunft left without a notice, the Engels on board were being prepared for their own drop. The arcanocyberxenobiological organisms, and their arcanocyberneticly-linked pilots, on this flotilla were assigned to Task Force Maximus. Their role in CATO was simple; it was to be a deliberate frontal assault on a Deep One city, supported by Norn-class Frigates, and backed up by conventional mecha, power armour and submersible craft.

Right now, one of the many launch bays, just above the waterline of the ship, was frantic with activity. The prodigious numbers of arcanotechnicians were running final checks on the crouched biomechanical monstrosities; ensuring that the weapons were functional and that the beasts were fully fed from the intravenous feeding tubes. The Engel systems did recycle their waste (as the D-Engine made a mockery of the thermodynamic restrictions on that), but it had been found that the organisms did not enjoy extended recycling, and tended to prompt their pilots to consume their foes. That was unnecessarily traumatising for the Engel pilots. It was just generally easier to make sure that the Engels were properly fed before a mission.

Standing around, fully clad in their plug suits, were the pilots. They were instantly recognisable, both from the thousand-metre gaze that so many of them had, and, more prominently, from the fact that the preliminary stage of the Engel Synthesis Implant interface had already been attached to their plug suit. The cables ran from the back of their necks and from their spines, through the suit, ready to be hooked up to the Engel itself. One of the walls of this area was partially blocked off, a bright yellow memomorph curtain warning of biohazardous contamination of nine bays (an all too common phenomenon when handling Engels), but if that phased either the pilots or the arcanotechnicians, then, apart from a few nervous glances, they didn't let it show.

_Now Embarking: Group 2. All pilots to entry ports. Group 2 to entry ports._

"It's us up next," said Captain Su Koru, wiping back sweat-slick hair from his face. "Remember the briefing. We're hitting them hard and fast. This is Deep Ops, so if your capsule gets breached, you're getting crushed. Of course, the 'Bots," the somewhat elitist term for conventional mecha, as opposed to the arcanocyberxenobiological Engels, "won't be able to use escape pods this deep, so they're in the same boat as we're in all the time. Try not to die, I don't want to have to write the letters back to your wives, husbands, boyfriends, girlfriends, or other people who chose not to fit into classical gender roles." He coughed. "I think the group can be described as "people you fuck in your spare time", really."

Zuly grinned. "Sir, yes sir! Even though I am not aware of a concept known as ''spare time'' in which I can fuck, I shall endeavour to ascertain the possible existence of such a thing and provide you with a full mission report. Sir!"

There was a snort from Miguel. "I doubt Kary would appreciate it if you took Azrael on a reconnaissance mission into your bedroom."

She grinned broadly in response. "Oh, I don't know. It could be interesting."

"I don't want to _know_."

"One word. And eight letters. It might be nine letters, actually. T. E. N. T. A. C. L. E. S. Yep, nine."

"I said, I didn't want to know! Too much information."

"Zuly, stop tormenting Miguel," chided Su. "Do unto others and all that." He saw the grin on her face broaden, and a wicked glint appear. "And I think we've hit my personal limit for 'Too Much Information', too."

"Ooooh, sir!" she said, in an exaggerated whine. "You're oppressing my cultural heritage!"

"Your cultural heritage involves making dirty jokes and telling people things about your sex life that they'd rather not hear?"

"Well, there's nothing that says that a cultural heritage has to be old, right. You humans are all the same," she added, with a sigh, tempered by the wicked grin.

There was a pause.

"I think this is about when Pecna makes a joke in Nazzadi which I don't understand," said Sam, taking off her AR glasses and carefully putting them in a sealed pocket on the side of her armour. "We've had the bit where Zuly... well, is herself, we had some jokey subspecism... yeah, I think it's time. Pecna?"

The Nazzadi blinked, his gaze breaking away from his Ish. "Oh, I'm sorry. I'm breaking routine... uh. Okay. _Hruk hruk._"

"_Da vehen iben_?" countered Zuly.

"_Vu huma ibi._

"_Kwa vu huma ibi?_" she asked.

"_Vu huma ibity opuli na!_"

It barely raised a chuckle among the group, even among those who could actually speak Nazzadi.

Miguel opened and closed his mouth a few times. "That was a knock-knock joke, wasn't it?" he finally hazarded.

"... yeah," Pecna admitted

"Thought so. It's tragic how the depravities of human culture has infected the purity of the Nazzadi way of life."

"Now you're just taking the piss."

"... yeah."

There was another silence.

"So, do you think we've done enough macho posturing to show that we're not afraid of death?" asked Zuly, with a wide grin.

"I'd say so, yes. Maybe for the next one, we can come up with a pseudo-scientific formula to calculate the perfect amount of time before it starts becoming uncomfortable for everyone."

"But I like macho posturing."

Su coughed. "Just remember, people, I'm serious about not wanting to have to write those letters. Don't get yourself killed if you can possibly avoid it."

_Now Embarking: Group 3. All pilots to entry ports. Group 3 to entry ports._

"That's us," said Sma, speaking for the first time. Zuly worried about Sma, she really did. He'd had been taken off active duty for three months, after what had happened in South Africa (not that she blamed him at all; it had been horrible for all of them), and the spark of life was very dim indeed, now.

Samantha went around, and gave each of them in turn a hug and a whispered, "If I don't make it back, don't steal my stuff."

Then, with a nod to each other, the Engel pilots were off to their beasts of war. Zuly looked up at Azrael, as she waited for the lift to the gantry level. As an Aqautic Assault Engel; the Hamshall was a main battle unit, and so, while still large compared to conventional mecha, at 12 metres still remained smaller than the Behemoth-class Chasmal or Seraph, who, when fully extended, reached 18 metres. The Hamshall Engel was encased in blue-green plating, the bulbous chest a contrast to the limbs, which were oddly spindly if one were to look at it with an eye which expected human proportions. She knew that part of the bulk of the torso was the housing for the tail,which retracted while on land, and stretched longer than the main body of the unit, the word "tail" not quite appropriate for something which resembled an appendage of the mythological Kraken. Likewise, the necessity to conceal what was under the armour meant that the feeder tendrils, which it could sprout at fill from its faceplate, were also retracted. But, ugly or not (and she preferred to think of it as "efficient"), Azrael was _her_ Engel.

The technicians escorted her along the gantry, repeating the standard warning about the abort procedure should anything go wrong or she start suffering mental contamination beyond those which contact induced. The uterine control capsule protruded from under the stomach (or, at least, where the stomach would have been if it were human) of the beast; she connected the air-hose to her helmet, checking that the neck-seal to the plug suit was tight before she climbed in, feet first, into the viscous, clear, impact fluid. The hatch sealed behind her, and and she took a great deal of care in linking the cables that extruded from the back of her suit up to their appropriate ports. You heard rumours of what happened if you didn't take care; the consequences were typically those which resulted when anything went wrong with Engels. Zuly took a deep breath of the clean, tasteless air, held it, then released it slowly before she indicated her readiness on the control console.

And then _it_ happened. Human vocabulary failed to describe properly what _it_ was like. If you had ever had your central nervous system connected up to the control schema of an alien form of life, you knew what _it_ was. If you hadn't, you didn't. There were qualia which you experienced; the feeling of being the higher awareness of the wrong body with a set of base instincts completely different to your own, which a tiny minority of the population would ever feel.

It set you apart.

"We have communion. Waveforms are locked. Move the Engel's left arm, please," said a voice over the headset. Zuly moved the arm, simultaneously moving her arm on the controls and flexing her blue-green coated arm. "Okay, good. Looks stable."

_Stable. Hah,_ thought Zuly, as she felt Azrael's mind stir from the slumber of the state they were kept in for storage. A surge of irritation flashed briefly across her mind, as the feeding tubes retracted from her... his head, the flow of nutrients ceasing. Azrael was feeling skittish, she knew; he longed to get in the water. The instincts were nagging that it would be more comfortable there. There was a sort of nervousness there was well, a form of nervous terror which left her skin tingling just from the after-feelings that were transmitted down to her body.

_Shush,_ she thought (or did she emote it?) to him. _Water soon. Kill things, make me happy. Good, yes?_

She felt the Engel pause, and calm down.

**hunger** it thought, the mental image of how it _felt_ to consume tiny figures which writhed and thrashed before being torn apart filling her mind. **satisfaction.**

She would have vomited, were it not for the fact she was familiar with Azrael. She hadn't named him that (such a name! So unimaginative; she would have gone for something out of those amusing Aztec myths, rather than _yet another_ Angel of Death). There had been two others attuned to Azrael that she knew of. One had burned out, the other had been hit by a charge beam which had punched through the control capsule and kept going. And Engels developed quirks the older they got; they could learn and change, albeit more at the level of a particularly vicious dog than a human being (the Project Engel scientists assured the pilots). The Hamshalliam were among the brighter breeds, and picked up quirks the fastest.

And what Azrael really liked was eating Deep Ones; grabbing them and pulling their legs off with its feeder tendrils before stuffing them into its maw. It appeared to have developed, on its own, the concept of nagging; if it looked like there was a chance that it might get to do it, it would prompt it as a solution in any combat situation.

The thing was, thought it was shameful to admit it, and the psychologist had gone quiet and made a note of it when she had raised it with the woman, it did _feel_ good. Rather than think of that, though, she busied herself with a full check of the systems onboard, while the support staff removed the gantries and restraints which bound the Engel.

She was just about finished, when a sudden wave of panic pulsed through the ESI and directly into her central nervous system, leaving her coated with cold sweat.

**fear**

"What's going on?" a voice barked in her ear. "You're hyperventilating, and you're suffering an elevated heart-rate." She could hear more of a commotion through the comms.

"Azrael," she gasped to the support crew, "he's... terrified. Fear... lots of it."

"You're still in communion. Are you still in control? Do you want to cut the link?"

She forced herself to breath properly, reasserting control of an usually autonomous function. "No... I'm... I'm still in control. Let me just..."

_Calm_, she thought at him, trying to push the emotion into him. _Calm. Safe now, not-hurt until later._

**fear** she received back, but the emotion was dimmed, reduced.

_Calm. No-enemy here._

One of the Hamshalliam further down the line let out a gurgling keen, tearing free of the mostly undone restrains. The freed monster collapsed, legs folding as it fell first to its knees, tearing apart the deck, before beginning to slam its head into the floor, over and over again, feeder tendrils extruded fully and darting wildly around.

_Calm_ Zuly thought at Azrael, over and over again, beating down fresh waves of fear. It was contagious, she thought, or perhaps it was affecting all the Hamshalliam.

The prostrate monster finally stopped beating its skull into the armoured floor, as someone managed to authorise a lock-down. That was already one Engel lost for the mission, as the creature would be furious for several days; they were utterly uncontrollable, even through the ESI, after a forced lockdown. A second succumbed to the wave of fear, or perhaps the pilot lost control. This time, the support teams acted faster, and locked it down before it could damage the floor or itself too much.

And then, just as suddenly, the Hamshalliam were calm again, just as the Ish, the support Engels in this operation, had been all along.

The sudden silence held for only a few seconds, before people started shouting and frantic messages started coming in from the rest of the ship, demanding to know precisely **what the fuck** was going on.

Zuly shuddered, within the fluid-filled uterine control capsule in the hollowed-out torso of a monster. _This is a really bad omen for CATO,_ she thought.

**fear** thought Azrael. **fear**

**reverence**

and fear

~'/|\'~

Icarus-Daleth-0861 tensed the muscles that ran along its shoulders, carbon nanofibre doing what sarcomere could not, anchored to composite bones both lighter and stronger than that of anything that lived within what had previously been called nature, and crushed the man's trachea. There was a sick, muted bubbling, as the dying man tried to scream though lungs already filling with blood and the pressure of 0861's arm still wrapped around his throat.

0861 felt the man's heart stop, and the involuntary contractions in the rest of his muscular system, with the cessation of the flow of oxygenated blood, begin to slow. It relaxed its grasp on the neck, and leapt sideways, back into the shadows, taking its prey with it. Red-lensed eyes scanned the area, the HUD providing information that even its enhanced senses could not normally perceive. Almost casually, the dark figure casually disembowelled the dead man, and, with a leap, shifted to the ceiling. The body was already starting to cool, it could see, and so it would pass unnoticed in the darkness of the pipes that ran across the ceiling, bound up their with its own guts. No-one would spot it until it and its kin had begun their true work, and by then, they would have more pressing concerns.

It was a weapon of both infiltration and terror.

But it had a task; something equivalent to and synonymous with life to 0861, and so it would perform it to the best of its abilities. Had it other options, it would not have killed the man standing guard on the roof of the target structure, but the target had been standing in a position, right under the overhang where it might possibly have alerted the foe when it and its kin entered the ducting system.

So the target's death was necessary. Daleth-0861 was satisfied it had fulfilled the criteria for a kill and thus had followed its directives.

That was good. Behind its eyes, the tiny shard of amplified soul sighed in contentment.

With a few blows from the hyperedged blades on its forearms, it cut away the plate that covered the ducting, and entered the system. It was in. And three more of its kin, all given pseudosapience by fragments of the same soul, followed it.

Underground, in the fortifications of the Eye that watched so valiantly over the seas, protecting the Chosen and Blooded, and their Elect servants from the malevolence of their foes, the air filtration system reported a failure in System 12bb, the fourth in the series of the zappers which, through intense EM radiation, denatured any nanites or micromachines which might be taken in. It was necessary that the air remain pure and clean. The Blooded responsible for watching the sector switched immediately to the camera which watched the device, and displaying on a second screen what was being shown when the alarm had happened.

Lurching over at the alarm, his supervisor harshly said, "Jung vf unc-cra'vat, lbh jrnx-oyb'bq'rq vqvb'g?!" _What happened, you idiot?!_

"Gure'r vf ab guvat ba gur f'vtug bs urng, abe va gur f'vtug bs gung ju-vpu uhznaf frr," he replied. _Nothing on IR, nothing on human-visible._ "Gur c'bff-vovyvgl rkvf'gf gung 'vg jnf cher-yl pbva-pvq'rapr." _Maybe it's just broken._

The warning alarm ceased, as the device started back up again. With mutual shrugs, the supervisor left, and the Blooded resumed his vigil. What was to happen was directly their fault for not checking the scrubber, but what were they to do? It was not infrequent that they overheated, hence the fact that there were five of them in series, each ensuring that any air that entered from the outside was free of nanites and micromachines, quite separate from the chemical and biological scrubbers. The behaviour of that failure was almost identical to one which failed and then rebooted itself almost instantly.

Inside the secure facility, a faint blurred shape crawled along, sticking to the shadows, weaving in and out of the pipes that lined the military installation. Above it, figures rushed and bustled, babbling and chattering in a notably inhuman tongue. The shape understood them, of course; it had been fitted with voice recognition technology which translated the Ry'lehan words into something that the shard of projected soul behind its eyes was capable of understanding.

With a flick, it pushed off onto the wall to its right, continuing its crawl.

A sixth sense flickered and it froze, before the wandering eyes of one of the targets could note its movement. The active camouflage settled into the wall, making it almost completely invisible in the nested piping and rough textures of the subterranean bunker. Better yet, the staff of this facility were exclusively those with inhuman ancestry; only they were trusted enough to man such a vital defence. Though that meant that they developed the ability to see in the infra-red as they aged and their blood transmuted them, it also meant that their eyesight deteriorated.

**Code:**

Internal Power Reserves:  
Primary D-Cell – 72.3%  
Secondary D-Cell A – 99.8 %  
Secondary D-Cell B – 98.1%

Because, after all, Icarus-Daleth-0861 was not truly sapient. Sentient, yes, and exceptionally so; its senses were engineered to beyond peak human, as well as the addition of several which its genetic source material did not have. It could feel the flow of electric currents in the cables nestled in the walls, taste the scent of _ruach_ as it was expended by sorcerers. But there normally was no awareness, no consciousness, no sense of self. It was a weapon, a tool, only motive while a fragment of a greater, more complete being was nested behinds its eyes, making it more than a fleshy doll. It was the golem who only was active while _emet_ was written on its forehead. It was merely that, instead of being empowered by kabalistic mysticism, it was instead given its mind by science that had gone so far into empiricism that it had taken on a terrible mysticism of its own; one which was more dreadful than past models because the _why_ could now be explained.

It was not scared of the lurching amphibians below it, even as it entered the target room, because fear would have required the capability for that emotion. It did not find them unnatural, because the innate revulsion and sense that they _should not be_ would have required a sense for that which was natural. It did not object to killing, because that was what it was designed for. And so it waited, completely devoid of boredom, hanging upside-down with its knees hooked around a pipe.

The mission clock on the HUD projected against its hard lenses ticked to the start of operations, at 01:50, on the 4th of November, 2091. It loosened its grip on the ceiling, and fell, down into the chamber. 0860, 0862 and 0863 were with it.

And so the killing started.

No, that wasn't quite true. The Nanite-Enhanced Retro-Viral agent that they had released into the ventilation system, right after the final nanite scrubber, was already acting. The Esoteric Order of Dagon insisted that only Deep Ones and the eldest and most changed among their Hybrid offspring man their defence lasers; humans were not thought to be reliable enough for such a vital task. And so every individual in this facility, with the exception of the Replica Assassins, had the blood vessel-rich area of skin around their neck which was already, or was developing into gills as their lungs atrophied.

Gills over which all their air passed, providing immediate passage into the bloodstream. The mammalian lungs of humans were safe in the body, shielded by the mucus-lined trachea and the own defences of the lungs. They may have evolved to protect themselves against the dust and grit so common on land, but it worked equally well to dilute the concentration of nanological and micrological agents.

The aquatic Deep Ones, and their heavily changed half-human hybrids had no such defence.

Some had already choked to death, the tailored virus (a modified version of a common disease found in vivisected Deep Ones) replicating with almost unnatural speed, and no opposition. The nanites had already done their work on the immune systems of the targets. Gills were squeezed shut, as secretions from the diseased flesh gummed them shut. Even the ones who had been in filtered armour, such as the powered armour which patrolled the corridors, were dying, because the NERV agent had been introduced more than one shift cycle ago.

The killing didn't start. But the bloodshed most certainly did, as the Assassins emotionlessly dispatched the crippled figures lying on the ground; Daleth-0863 sealing the door with a single punch to the lock mechanism, the electrical burst frying the systems. It was trivial to disable the capital-grade D-Engines, the Replica Assassins fully aware of what was necessary to destroy a design which had been stolen from humanity in the first place and equipped with the necessary tools to force an emergency shutdown.

By the time the four clone-siblings left the place, through the same way they had entered, the floor was slick with blood; their footprints leaving a visceral record of their movements. The gantries in the D-Engine room were cleared too, and the targets used to make a bloody warning of their activities. Even if the Dagonites could break down the door (even assuming that there was anyone alive in this place), they would need to take apart the arcanotechnology and manually reconfigure it, the forced shutdown having normalised the local spacetime. That was a task which required specialist arcanoengineers and a great deal of time. And time was one thing that the local Esoteric Order of Dagon did not have. In fact, now that the Eyes were being disabled, their time had just run out.

There was a message, painted in blood, in the D-Engine rooms of every single Eye along this coastline. It (a trite little rhyme, perhaps, but SWD propagandists had decided that something this clear was needed) went like this;

_We now return,  
Deep Ones will learn,  
New kinds of fear,  
While we are here._

Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam  


And now it was time to show the monsters just what the collection of human sub-species would do.

For survival.

For their planet.

To get what they wanted.

~'/|\'~


	17. Chapter 14: CATOclysm: Execution

**Chapter 14**

CATOcylsm: Execution

~'/|\'~

The dark shape of the lead Evangelion took another step, a cloud of particulate matter erupting from the bed of the deepwater channel from the force of its foot. Even from this depth, with the amplification of the filters in the sensory package it could be seen that the surface of the water, many tens of meters above, was lit in a way which it should not have been; reds and oranges seeping into what should have been the lunar illumination of the night. Behind it, its siblings followed, through the smoke-like clouds of silt which they merely added to.

A barrage of blue-green lasers lashed out from the new surface mounts on the lead figure. They may have been of power armour grade, woefully inadequate for anything the size of a proper mecha, let alone a Herald or a capital ship, but that wasn't their role. The muted thud and pressure wave from the mine which a dedicated LAI system had detected, and then eliminated, spoke of their true purpose. Neither the mines that littered the area in truly gratuitous amounts, nor the barrage of obsolete missiles which was expected as soon as they left the water, would be able to touch the monstrous bipeds, the laser point defence easily able to reach out and shield its mount.

And if they could still kill a man or a Deep One with ease, especially in the cold of Iceland (which meant that the difference between body temperature and the ambient temperature was enough to trip the thermal sensors, without having to rely on image recognition), well... that was merely an added bonus. Progress marched ever on, and those who could not keep ahead would be ground underfoot.

Another step; another cloud of silt. It was fortunate, perhaps, that the seabed around here had been deepened until it hit the volcanic rock of Iceland, meaning that the silt and sand layered upon it was thin. Had this been the cold, dark abyssal planes of the ocean, far from human influence or the mutative effects of plate tectonics, it would have been eminently possible that the humanoid figures would have sunk had they tried to walk on it; an end which would have been entirely inappropriate, albeit amusing.

Shinji, in the second Evangelion (its eyes actinic headlights through the depths compared to the four viridian flares of Unit 01, or the red searchlight of Unit 00), looked around and shivered. They were very close now; the HUD was counting worryingly fast. That island, Hrísey, the one covered in anti-capital unit defence, was just in front of them, the deep-water shipping channel which the Evangelions were walking down just skirting around it. If the defences hadn't been shut down, they were going to get shot at by naval grade lasers. And if only some of them had been shut down, they were still going to get lasered. Wasn't it likely that at least one of the sabotage missions had failed? After all, wasn't it really improbable that they had all worked? What if the guards at one place had caught the GIA commandos? They'd have raised the alarm, and then the others would have been much more difficult. Or what if they had hidden some. What if there were some underwater, sitting there, lurking, which the NEG hadn't known about? The Evangelions could walk right into them without noticing.

As all these prospects ran through his head, he began to breath faster, sucking in gulps of LCL. He could feel the viscous liquid rolling in his throat, coating the walls as it was forced in and out by his breaths, and he gagged; something he hadn't done in a while.

"You are exhibiting signs of pre-combat stress," informed his LAI, in its bland voice. "Your heart-rate is elevated, you are hyperventilating," and here the tone of the voice shifted slightly, "and your synchronisation ratio is dropping. Please, Shinji, stay calm."

He spluttered into the LCL, trying to resist the urge to throw up. Why was he getting so nervous now?

Well, yes, he knew exactly why he was getting nervous now. He was about to go into a real, proper, battle, where the enemy had things that could kill him if they hadn't been shut down, and face things which included real people, even if they were cultists. You'd have to be stupid not to be worried. But couldn't he have had the panic attack back on the ship, where things could have been managed, and he could have been reassured?

Out here, beneath the sea, with enforced radio silence, there was only the terrible claustrophobia of the inside of his own head, and the darkness of the depths with enveloped and wrapped their way around his Evangelion, the glare of the eyes not enough to alleviate the all-encompassing liquid night.

Shinji gave a weak chuckle, more of a gurgle with his fluid-filled lungs, and reached out to one of the auxiliary panels.

_Of course..._

With the thermal vision turned on, the false colour of the far-infrared painting the world in colours which did not match to the real qualia of the human brain, the darkness was banished. Even in cold areas, the blue-black was better than the black-black of the depths. Just the extra light was enough to banish any thought of the night-dark hallways which echoed on forever to the beating of a heart-train.

He was vaguely aware of the presence of an active comms window.

"What is it, Asuka?" he asked without looking.

"You are not playing enough attention in an active combat zone if you believe that I am the Second Child," stated Rei, her hair waving loose, like seaweed, in the eddies and currents of the LCL that enveloped all three of the pilots. "I will repeat the statement. According to the mission clock, we should be emerging from the water in two minutes and seventeen seconds, as of the start of this statement. However, this is incorrect, and, in fact the head of Unit 02 shall become visible in one minute and twenty nine seconds, as of the start of this sentence."

"... okay," Shinji said, cautiously. "Uh... have you told Asuka about this?"

"Yes. She did not appreciate it, and was somewhat disturbed by it. Nevertheless, she will account for the change in the information." Rei paused. "I have noticed a tendency..."

"_Mein Gott_, will you two _stop_ chattering!" snapped Asuka through a new window. "Whatever happened to radio silence?"

Asuka was nervous, she admitted to herself. But only inside her head. And that was partly due to the fact that Rei had opened that window, to inform her that the mission plan was wrong. She certainly wasn't going to let it show by blabbering on like that. But it was almost time, and she was ready. As the only New Earth Government officer among the pilots, she had technical seniority (not that the other two would necessarily pay any attention, she added, bitterly), and with the weapon set the Project had given her, she was the vanguard. Well, at least they could do _something_ right.

She could feel the stillness and the coolness inside her head. It was time.

The dark shape of Unit 02 moved up the fjord, unnaturally strong legs beating. The surface of the water, reflecting the fire-lit clouds, rippled and bulged as the hidden monster pushed its way along, walking along the bottom of the deep-water channel. Blue-green light flared around it, muffled blasts of water exploding upwards; always in front of it, never quite where it was.

A second shape followed it.

And a third.

A head broke the surface of the waters, four eyes aflame with viridian light. Asuka looked left and right, eyes scanning the city that filled this area, built all over the flatter coastal regions. The urge was almost instictual; the Evangelions were by no means reliant on the hijacked optic nerves of the arcanoxenobiological organism beneath the armour, but it just felt _right_ to look around, rather than stare at the screens in the entry plug. The city was already burning, the NEGN missile barrage still in progress despite the damage it had already done. Projected onto the HUD on the inside of the plug were the positions of the friendly special forces units, hidden within their stealthed IFVs. They had to avoid

From all around the frontline fortifications, masses of concrete protruding up against the cold waters of the Atlantic, a ragged cheer arose. Asuka smiled. _Idiots! Do they really think that we've come to save them from the missiles? Except in a terminal way. They're under heavy attack, and they think the mysterious figures are here to help? What are they, completely stupid? How can they have lasted this long?_ The redhead shrugged at the cliché of her thoughts, as she took another step forwards, climbing out of the deep water channel. The ships that would have needed such a thing were already ruined. She could see that one of the ships was arcing actinic multicoloured lightning, coruscating and burning over the surface, charring the metal. She tagged the target as high priority; a D-Engine malfunctioning from damage like that, with what looked like a possible Horizon Event, could not be permitted to exist.

She twitched her fingers, the click of the joints muted by the orange-red fluid that surrounded her. Unit 02 twitched with her, more a generalised movement than one of the hands; the synchronisation ratio remained too low for such precision. She wanted to open fire right now. But Asuka repressed the urge, and took another step forwards and upwards, exposing more of herself to the defence lasers.

_If they hadn't sabotaged the weapons, this is going to hurt_, she thought, as explosions blossomed across the city and missiles streaked across the sky, smart sub-munitions cutting down anyone not under cover, the invisible plague of BCNaM warfare making even the air unsafe,

The figure of Unit 02 was by now half-way out of the water, water cascading off its flanks. It was not well lit; its shape was a darker patch against the sky, with only those four eyes, awesome in a primal sense, giving off light. Even night-vision goggles worked imperfectly, somehow skipping slightly away from it, as the basilisk-type camouflage interfered with the obsolete amplification systems in the Second Cold War-era electronics in the Dagonite viewers. In the light of the fires than now spread across the city, from the missiles that the NEG were now lobbing against the innocent civilians of the Elect, it was barely visible. If the onlookers had been in a suitable state of mind, they might have noticed the manufactured look of the behemoth. They were not. The strategy had been conceived on the assumption that the Dagonites would pause upon first sight of the Evangelions, which, after all, were sufficiently different from the Engels that the fish-men should believe that they might be a friendly extranormal entity. Something which the recent refit had been designed to promote, as well as the dream-engineering conducted by teams of sorcerers working in unison for almost a month, now.

Another head emerged from behind it, and the two harsh, actinic white eyes of Unit 01 joined its sibling in staring over the city of _Dagon'uvtu Oraribyrapr_. They both continued their inexorable march, though, and the third sibling, one crimson Cyclopean orb atop its head, of Rei's Zero-Zero, joined them.

"Sensors detect a still-active D-Engine in Defence Laser 07," noted Rei. "Target has been acquired, and the charge beam has adjusted for ambient electromagnetic fields. I am able to fire on command."

"I'm aiming at Sector 01," said Shinji, a slight shake in his voice. "Uh... the LAI has highlighted concentrations of enemy forces for me. I'm ready."

"I'm in position for Sector 02," added Asuka. "The automated fire-control systems are primed, and the indicator on main weapon is green." She paused. "We're ready," she said, unable and unwilling to keep the enthusiasm from her voice.

A **[VOICE ONLY]** icon appeared on all three viewscreens, the authentication code showing that it came from Misato. "Do not use the main weapons in the areas marked in red on the overlay; they have friendly forces operating in theatre, or have been noted as being Dagonite-operated camps. Apart from that...weapons free," ordered the Major, in a tone of voice not dissimilar to that which Asuka had used.

And with a cold, contemptuous glare, Asuka raised her plasmathrower, and vomited forth the raw material of stars, a blinding lance which illuminated the clouds above in white light. The armoured structures, disguised as apartment buildings, which made up the first line of defence, literally evaporated, the tight cone cutting through them in a way which left no intermediate state from intact structure to melted slag and vapour. Beside her, the stream of smeared suns which the plasma minigun bought into existence spun into existence, whipping from one cluster of red boxes on Shinji's viewscreen, resting there for no more than the seconds needed for the LAI to remove the threat indicators, before he moved it on.

He glanced over at Asuka, and felt the synchronisation training stir, from the way that the targeting schema they had both been given matched. A barrage of missiles, broken and inconsistent, was spewed forth from the intact fortifications; a pale reflection of what they should have been facing where they facing the true defences, unbroken by sabotage and the betrayal of their "gods", but still remarkably intense. The LAI systems devoted to the management of the laser grid had already shifted from the aquatic mode, where they had been handling the minefield, to the anti-missile grid system, and the air was thusly filled with the ripened explosions of the cascade of fruit-like missiles, their smart electronic systems long obsolete, and suffering massive interference from the rebroadcast nano-and-micromachines which filled the air.

And Rei? Rei stood alone, the bulky charge beam, which the others had inexplicably deemed the "Rei Gun" despite the manifest inaccuracy of such a term (as it failed to describe the damage mechanism for the relativistic particle beam), already raised, sunk to one knee in the water as she braced the bulk of Unit 00 for the hideous recoil of this weapon. They had integrated A-Pods into the design, the reactionless thrusters serving to shift the change in momentum to the reinforced structure of the the weapon, compressed between two opposing forces, rather than the (almost hopelessly flawed for recoil mitigation) bipedal mech, but there was only so much that even nanofactory diamond and carbon nanotubes could take.

The impact, and its resulting explosion and burst of hard X-rays, tore apart the Dagonite defence laser, and, air shimmering green in the afterglow of the passage of the protons, ripped through the buildings behind it, down into the Earth itself, proved that the weapon did at least not blow up on the _first_ shot.

"Rei!" warned the Major, her flushed face on screen. "You just hit a red zone; there was a camp area that you just tore through. Control that thing, or I'll have it deactivated! Dial down the yield if it's over-penetrating," she added, in a quieter voice.

"It was necessary," Rei said calmly. "That laser had not been deactivated. Permission was granted to perform such actions in order to ensure the success of Task Force Nero. It was felt that an operational capital-grade static laser weapon might pose an impediment to our duties," the white-haired girl remarked.

The Major nodded. "Proceed." Misato sucked in a breath. "Be careful, though."

"I will be full of care."

"Not for the fish-scum," said Asuka, as she washed the lance of white-hot plasma over a Dagonite residential district.

Rei stared at Asuka, for perhaps a second too long. "Understood," she said, as she scanned the screen for anything else which might require the firepower she bought, which was really overkill for soft targets.

It said something that soft-targets included things which, in another era, would have been called nuclear bunkers. This was not war. This was pest control.

~'/|\'~

The pale figure floated mindlessly in its orange-tinted tank, eyes open but vacant. Around it, the hybridised fusion of modern technology and ancient sorcery embraced him, needles piercing its flesh in so many places, spreading out branch-like through the body.

"Dr Wade, the binding circle is active. As soon as the input source is limited, it will be drawn here, and the Type-2 _Seelenversetzung_ can be remedied."

The blond woman nodded, then cocked her head slightly. "Are you scared?"

The man gulped. "Terrified."

"Me too. But it's necessary. This asset will be needed." She sighed. "We can only hope that target can be suitably prepared before the Third eliminates it."

~'/|\'~

Deep, deep, deep down into the hungry void the Engels swam. Even in full daylight, no light made its way down two hundred metres, and the pale reflection which was the moon ceased its luminescence even shallower. The arcanocyberxenobiological organisms were far deeper than that already, only minutes after the drop. The blade of the strike force, they were in full combat mode. The tendrils of the Hamshalliam tasted the water, languid movements which pulsed in a peculiar asymmetry, drawing the water in as hair-thin lesser tentacles filtered the seas of life, while the Ish lashed out with their long, blade-like tongues at any fish which passed their way, spearing them and pulling their catch back into the waiting maw.

The Engels did so enjoy a chance to release the constraints on the armour, and feel the water around them.

Above, the bloated hulls of the frigates and submersibles accompanying the strike force descended, vast cigar shapes around which the conventional mecha swarmed in patterns which resembled most the flight of starlings; superficial chaotic, yet possessed of an emergent order designed to make them harder to hit. The LAI systems on the craft chattered constantly to each other, tightbeam laser communications streaming data far more efficiently than the squishy organics in this vast nervous system of silicon and crystals and electrical charge could ever have hoped to achieve. Such a system would be damped down massively if they were facing the Migou, who were just as good (actually, tactical analysis put them as notably better) at intelligence warfare as mankind, but against the inferior systems of the Dagonites, they could be used closer to their maximum potential. Though they were not self-aware, they were sentient, able to respond to their environment and react to data inputs.

And then there were the autonomous units. How much intellect was needed to control a torpedo and the swarm of guided sub-munitions they would drop split into, one "mind" between many bodies? Little enough that such a weapon could be deployed in vast quantities. Up, above the sea (and especially against the Migou), these things would have faced the laser coverage of defence emplacements. Down here, though, these micro-swarms (each submunition individually smaller than a fish), and possessed of the same swarming emergent mind which made them exceptionally hard for the sub-par data processing of the Deep One masters of the Esoteric Order of Dagon possessed to target. This was a problem which was worsened in these aquatic conditions, where lasers, the optimal point defence weapons, were dispersed and necessarily limited in range.

Of course, this was a problem for the New Earth Government Navy as well, especially since the anti-torpedo laser grids were necessarily larger, and more power intensive than anti-missile ones, and so could only be mounted on the larger submersibles and capital ships. The casualties from the torpedo batteries could be potentially crippling, and so that was why the static defences of the Deep One city of _Guh'thya-leh'yi_ were the first targets. Even then, the vanguard would likely take nasty losses from the inter-lapping torpedo, laser batteries and the charge beams that shielded the area.

Azrael flicked a tendril out, and pulled a fish into his maw, the thin trail of blood from where he had crushed its skull the only trace that it had ever existed. Nestled deep within the gut of the monster, in her entry plug, Zuly felt a brief pulse of satisfaction and sanity pulse through her central nervous system, the inhuman emotion retracting as quickly as it had entered.

She kept one eye on the bathometer, watching the distance until the holding depth tick down.

"Two hundred meters until Depth Bravo," her system LAI informed her unnecessarily.

"I know," she growled back.

The dumb system didn't respond. Although such a response was understood, the programmers had quite specifically pruned it of responses which would aggravate a pilot in a combat situation. It merely saved the audiofile, logged with the constantly tracked vitals, in the mission record.

An audiovisual window opened in the uterine capsule of the Engel, the security code showing its source was genuine. It was Captain Koru. "We're at Depth Bravo. We're holding here until Command sends us the go code." He sighed, slightly. "I want a CCI."

Ping signals and the mandatory responses echoed in from the rest of the squad, in the Communion Check-In. For an Engel, the standard, autonomous system wasn't enough. If the thing under the armour managed to gain control, either through overpowering the restraints, or those whispered times where it managed to absorb the mind of the pilot, an LAI response that the vehicle was still intact wasn't enough.

And for an Engel squadron entirely composed of Hamshalliam, this was considerably more worrying than normal. They had all seen, all felt what had happened back on the ships. Hamshalliam were already a troublesome breed; too smart for their own good in many ways, and if they were on the edge, that was certainly going to put their pilots on edge.

It was dark down here. They couldn't have the searchlights on, and the light sources which would compose part of the initial barrage (the colour shifted into the blue, due to the fact that Deep One vision tended to the longer wavelength end of the spectrum, compared to that of the _Homo sapiens_ subspecies,) had quite obviously not been fired yet.

Zuly waited, curled up in the uterine plug implanted into the chest of her Engel, counting down unknown seconds while Command prevaricated over sending the initialisation code. Or whatever reason they had to leave the task force sitting here, vulnerable. They were already minutes behind schedule, and when the fact that Operation CATO was a wide-area attack over Dagonite territory, the risk that they be detected, and the forces attacked, negating any surprise or shock and pushing the attackers onto the back foot was dangerously high.

~'/|\'~

Following the vast figures, which towered far above the troops which were being disgorged from Ranger AFVs at the shoreline, the Replicas advanced. Tight-band radios pierced the deliberate holes in the jamming that saturated the electromagnetic communications spectrum as troopers efficiently and rapidly shared information with their squadmates, aided by the _Seelengehilfe_-bonding from the noetic presence that lurked behind their eyes. The silvery dust that hung in the air, sparking in the harsh white light which vomited forth from the behemoths, was a fine mix of micro-and-nanomachines, designed to absorb and re-radiate the radio spectrum, the phase differences destructively interfering with the enemy communications, as well as reducing the maximum effective range of their anti-air and anti-missile laser weaponry. The fact that so much metallic dust, even when it was not designed as a nanological weapon, was still toxic and choking to unprotected lungs, was merely a benefit.

The frontlines were not a place for unprotected infantry. All of the Replica troops were in sealed combat armour, and all deployed outside of the vehicles were in REV-3 heavy armour at the least. Most were in the REV-6 or the REV-8 EPA or one of their variants.

Against the Migou, such a formation would have been cut to pieces. Powered armour and the even lighter heavy armour, a somewhat unfortunately-named trial model designed to replace the role of conventional infantry on the battlefield, were comparatively unarmoured. Even when supported by their AFVs, they would have got bogged down, and been quickly destroyed by a force with proper main battle units. Against the Dagonites, with their inferior logistics which forced them to rely upon powered armour themselves, this was a viable tactic, especially within the tight confines, which gave maximum advantage to the individual superiority of the Replicas over the Order forces, which relied heavily upon militia for their numbers.

And against the REV-8 EPA, which was specifically designed to target and destroy enemy power armoured units, with the substitution of any melee functionality for superior firepower, the lightly armoured and armed Dagonite units were shredded.

The six man Replica squad, safe within their sealed armour and operating in the standard NEG infantry pair-system, paused in the hallway, watching all sides. The militia, and the rarer true military forces of the Order, were dug into these apartment complexes, designed specifically as solid, almost bunker-like structures, to protect both their infantry and their own powered armour.

"Looks like some kind of command post. 816, cleanse and purify" ordered Foxtrot 811, stepping out of the way, as the bulk of the REV-8-CQB stepped up to the armoured door.

"It's sealed, and too solid for brute force," radioed back 816. "Requesting that 814 punch a hole in the door before assault."

"Request approved. 814, beam it."

"Order acknowledged. Please retreat to minimum safe distance," warned 814, in the REV-8-S, the sniper variant, as the Replica levelled the charge beam mounted on his right arm at the door. There were a few thunderous footsteps, as the other REV-8 units took steps back. "Breaching door in 3, 2, 1."

The beam of high energy protons punched straight through the reinforced door, a burst of neutrons and hard electromagnetic radiation accompanying its impact. Foxtrot 816, advancing to the glowing hole, levelled his arm and triggered the flamethrower, the white-hot chemical mix rushing out to fill the room. The metal door began to melt, not to speak of the infantry and sensitive communications equipment who had been inside the room, the former with multiple heavy weapons pointed at the door, judging from the explosions. The interior structure groaned, as the underfloor reinforcement melted, a cascade of volatile fluid pouring down through the new hole in the floor.

Several blue-green lasers punched back out of the smoke and ionised gas that now filled the command centre; heavily attenuated by the opacity of the atmosphere, but still enough to be lethal to an unarmoured figure. One beam scraped along the arm of the REV-8-CQB, breaking the jet of white-hot fuel.

"Minor damage to torso," reported 816, retreating back behind the cover of the unruptured parts of the heavy door. "Flamethrower auto-shutdown to prevent premature fuel ignition."

"Target ID?" asked his partner, Foxtrot 815.

"At least two laser-armed PA. Cannot confirm presence of any other target."

"Selkies?" queried 813.

"Probably. Weapon characteristics match."

"Acknowledged. Initiating Narrow Area Search." With a pop of gas, a small drone, about the size of a man's fist, launched itself from 813's REV-8, tiny thrusters flaring from the internal D-Cell. These things were too small for the use of an A-Pod, which would enable indefinite operation (through there were true combat scout drones, which even now hung stealthed above the city; a substitute for the satellite coverage which armed forces once enjoyed), and so were forced to return to their master suit, to recharge off the D-Engine. It hung in the air for a second, and then darted through the hole in the wall. No volley of laser fire could be heard, which suggested that it had gone unnoticed; a fact confirmed by the appearance on the HUD of the unit of the location and model of two Order powered armours.

"Target lock on Tango Alpha," stated Foxtrot 814, charge beam pointed directly at the first of the two targets, uncaring of the armoured wall in the way.

"In position for Tango Bravo," added 813, plasma cannons at the ready, standing by the hole in the door, with words that were echoed by Foxtrot 812.

"Execute on 814's command," stated 811.

There was a moment of stillness, as missiles shrieked outside, thudding explosions making the heavily reinforced building shake.

"Firing."

The relativistic particle beam tore through the reinforced wall and kept going, the disruption in the arcanomagnetic containment field leaving it corkscrewing slightly, but still accurate enough to slam into the chest of the first armour, knocking it onto its back, as the ammunition for the HMG on its arm cooked off. The feed from the drone died, the pressure wave from the explosion and detonation of the onboard systems on the power armour crushing it against a wall.

Together, Foxtrot 813 and 812 stepped through the hole in the doorway, triggering their dual plasma cannons, one on each arm, pumping tiny suns (so small, compared to the river of stars which one of the titans had carried with it) into the one remaining figure that stood upright in the devastation which 816 had caused. The simple fact was that laser weapons, in such an optically opaque environment, were a suboptimal choice compared to the particle beams of plasma cannons, which cut through the nanomachine dust and the smoke, tearing the Selkie apart at the waist and vaporising torso-sized chunks out of the wall, the explosions filling the air with even more superheated dust. It would have been enough to kill any infantry in the area, had the infantry not already been almost instantly killed by the room being aerated by white-hot volatile chemicals.

Two last shots tore apart the air, as Foxtrot 812 ensured that the armour hit by 814 was indeed dead.

"Clear."

"Clear."

Slowly, oh so slowly, the room began to clear, the smoke and particulate matter settling, or escaping through the many structurally superfluous openings which the combat (less than 30 seconds in duration) had opened. Through these impromptu windows, especially those caused by the charge beam (which reached all the way through the building and out), the flashes of light from outside sept in, as conflicts such as this were repeated a hundred times.

"Command, this is Foxtrot 811. Dagonite comms centre, target priority Beth-2, eliminated. Be aware; flamethrower on team's CQB suit out of operations. Requesting new orders."

The clouds, seen through a hole in the ceiling from the detonating infantry weapons, were lit by the fires that consumed this city, and pierced by missiles, as the ship-board bombardment continued unabated. Far above the clouds, NEG air superiority missions had already swatted the few Order aircraft, and now their bombers and ground-attack air units slaughtered targets in the areas where the Surface-to-Air Lasers and Missiles had been taken down. Overhead, only audible by the displacement of air that it left as it moved, a Chalybion gunship flew low overhead, the single charge beam it mounted in its tail-like turret accompanying the nose-laser in hunting for enemy mecha in the city.

The blue-grey chassis blended in near perfectly in the night, as it found its prey unaware of the insect-like hunter. There was the explosion of a relativistic particle beam impact outside, as it tore off a Dagonite Leviathan's leg off at the hip, the war machine crashing to the ground. It was mercilessly cut to pieces as it lay crippled, the LAI systems placing the rapid laser shots (each enough to blow a fist-sized hole in a man's torso) into the weakpoints. A second shot ensured the target was down, and the Chalybion retreated into the sky.

"Foxtrot Squad ORPH-PN1-012, this is Command. JSN-AR2-043 and -045 are pinned down by heavy Order opposition. Report skilled anti-armour sniper, as well as use of unrecognised power armour with a CQB focus. Area still has active AA, so there can be no close-fire support. Transmitting coordinates now."

"Acknowledged, Command. ORPH-PN1-012 moving out."

As one, they left the place. It was not a charnel house. A charnel house would have had bodies, which would have decayed as the inevitability of entropy overcame the structure of the flesh. The cycle of life would have continued, as dead flesh fed the smallest of living things and was broken down. But in this place, there was only a stark reminder that the human body could accurately be described as a sack of dirty water wrapped around a frame. The only traces of the former inhabitants were slagged metal; the remains a sign of intelligent craft which remained where the flesh could not.

~'/|\'~

Misato watched the progress of the Evangelions on the model of the battlefield, built from the cumulative feeds from the stealthed drones even now hidden above Iceland. It wasn't exactly hard. She strongly suspected that they could have been tracked with the naked eye from orbit. The plasmathrower, and the plasma minigun were not subtle weapons. In fact, anything which threw out the raw material of stars, at a higher temperature than the surface of our own sun, could quite accurately be said to be the opposite of subtle. And the charge beam, which she was going to call the Rei Gun, damn it, may not have flooded the electromagnetic spectrum, both visible and outside the human range, when fired, but the spikes in the sensors it was making when the relativistic particle beam hit something (the sensor officers called it a "whoomp-bloomp", from the initial pulse of hard radiation, and exotic particles, and the subsequent chain of decay products) were characteristic, and massive compared to the lesser versions of the same weapon being used by the mecha on the same island.

"This is Nero-Command to Nero-Evas," she said, noting the fact that they were slightly behind schedule. "You don't need to flatten the city. The troops are moving up behind you; you're here to punch through." She paused. "And keep an eye on the map," she added. "It's tracking friendlies as they move forwards; do not, I repeat, do not use the capital grade weapons when there are friendlies in close proximity. Or medium proximity, Rei."

Asuka, her face floating before the Major on the control display, looked somewhat offended. "Yes," she said. "I am aware of friendly fire and its.... arrrrgh," the girl snarled, turning away from the screen as a cascade of supersonic cracks, so quiet in comparison to the din of war, coincided with a flurry of slugs ricocheting off the sloped armour of the Type-D. The lance of plasma reignited and washed over a street barricade and a fair amount of the surrounding neighbourhood, the anti-armour railgunners hidden in the festival junk gone in one painless instant. A glowing scar was dug into the street, down into the land, while the street and buildings around melted like hot wax, despite the fact that the actual core of the lance of plasma had not touched them. "_Welcher Schwachkopf würde Infanterie gegen ein Evangelion einsetzen? Schwach! Ihr seid so schwach! Es ist fast eine Vergeudung, euch alle mit der dicken Wumme zu töten!_" she roared in triumph.

"English, Asuka, English," sighed the Major. "We use a standardised combat language here, remember."

"Okay." The girl paused, as the secondary plasma cannons and charge weapons tracked and acquired a power armoured squad, the LAIs only asking confirmation for the firing lock before cutting down the soldiers with ruthless precision. "_Nicht, dass mich das jetzt aufhalten wird_," she muttered, rebelliously.

Shinji glanced at the red-head's picture, eyes narrowed slightly. "What's a 'weak head'?" he asked, in a somewhat wearied tone.

"You are. Move up, Shinji, and take out DK/77. You're falling behind." She smirked. He really had set himself up for that, hadn't he?

"You're running off! We're meant to be working as a group."

"Yes. We are, Rei's with me. _You_ are the one who's falling behind."

"Unit 00 is closer to Unit 02 than Unit...," began Rei, before an impact jolted her, hair drifting lazily after her head through the LCL. Unit 00 fell to one knee, in a crashing impact, as the road's surface erupted, melted tar and projectiles thrown upwards like an erupting volcano. There was the sound of a pained gasp over the communications channel.

_S'bepr'fh-crevbe_ Phu'hului'yi stared at the viewscreen on his binoculars, the screen mitigating the inferior long-distance eyesight he had, out of water, compared to the invading blasphemers. Such atrocity! That they would disguise their already sacrilegious war machines... he tried out the word in his mouth, "Ehn'ghul. Een-guhl," as one of the blessed _Dagon'puvyqera_... well, it was much more than just one heresy. It was doubly heretical, if not more so.

That was why he was so exceptionally pleased that he had been given command of the _III Z'nxvat Haz'nxvat_, one of the engineering companies, to use the human term, in charge of local defence. He had not been so before; the task, being on land, was one which was not held highly, and even the increased breeding rights did not make up for the discomfort of the _syhvq'xr-rcvat_, the water retention suit he had to wear for extended periods of time on land. He had even asked revered Pth'thya-l'yi, the revered high priestess and matriarch of his lineage, why it was necessary that one of the Chosen hold this position, why it could not simply be left to a trusted Blooded. He had not asked why it could not have been a human, for such a minor role, but he had thought it.

The answer, of course, was that it was not done to permit the Blooded too much authority. There must be a clear line of delineation between those who had taken to the water, and those who had not, for the good of society. If those who remained too human were given the powers which should remain the preserve of the Chosen, then then the _Homo_ genus would have problems seeing the natural order of things, the simple fact that they had not been Chosen and so their faith, pitiful and childlike despite its sincerity, was not worth as much.

Of course, Phu'hului'yi suspected that it was due to his lack of breeding, that he had once dwelt on land, and although not as low as the almost-mass produced Blooded soldiers that the current conflict had spawned, he did not rank highly in the society beneath the waves (though the humans here treated him as one akin to a saint or an angel). And the fact that he had made some... foolish decisions, long ago (though not as the _gehr'pu-b'fra_ (for that was what the Chosen who possessed a pure lineage called themselves) reckoned it), could not have helped. It was not his fault. He had not known at the time.

But, now, as he observed the plume of molten tar and dust splatter down on the ground through the binoculars, it all seemed worth it. He had positioned those inferior, un-Blooded humans near to the shaped charge for exactly that reason; to make the blasphemies pause for a moment.

"Va gur Dagon'anzr, erny-yl tbb'q gung gurl q'vrq j'vgu fhpu uba'bhe," he remarked to his immediate subordinate, and the only other one of the Chosen in the formation, put here due to her youth and early transformation. Too weak and young for her Gifts, those blessed powers that the New Earth Government ignorantly called "parapsychic powers", and put down to some kind of freak evolutionary trait, to have come in strongly, he still broadly appreciated the presence of a _Oen'va-ernq're 'guvrs_ of Dagon.

_S'bepr'fr-pbaq_ Thul'yhu-gi gave her assent, making the ritualistic gesture as best she could while lying flat on the roof, under a thermally camouflaged blanket. "Vg r'kv-fgf pregn'va, c'bf-fvoyl?" she asked cautiously. "Xab-jyrq'tr pregn'va gung fh'pu oynfg q'rf-gebl'rq gnet-rg Ehn'ghul?"

Phu'hului'yi made a disgusted noise. "Cebon-oyr gung gur guvat y'virf," he said, loathing in his voice. " Ehn-ghul! Ehn-ghul! Shp'x rirel Nu Earf Gubbermaent! Gur've r-kv'f-grapr'f j'ebat, naq gurl pregn'vayl gb-b g'bhtu. J'nvg hag-vy uh'zna-eha'are o'ev-atf z'rff-ntr orsb'er arkg pu'netr," he added in a softer tone of voice, though the irritation remained.

No sooner had he said that, than a human runner poked their head up through the open trapdoor, exertion visible by inference from the increased temperature of the gas from his filtration unit . This one, he could see, was dressed in proper military armour, not the mass-produced, pre-nanofactory gear given to the militia, albeit the stripped down version used by runners. It was ironic, Phu'hului'yi considered, that the end effect of all this technological advance (specifically that of their enemies) had been to reduce the faithful to systems of battlefield communications that would not have been out of place in the great war (how petty and small it was now, by comparison) of his youth.

"_I...i...ireel erf'chap...gh...ghy'ngrq Ss'behepr'fah-crevne_," he began, coughing, his exhaustion making an almost profane mockery of the syllables of Ry'lehan. Humans required effort to fit their way around the wet sounds of the language of their superiors, and the exhaustion and dry mouth of a runner didn't aid in such an attempt. Most understood it quite a bit better than they could speak it, though.

Thul'yhu-gi made a noise of annoyance at Phu-hului'yi, which went by the human entirely unnoticed. "Schpeak... een... ghu'man," she said, in what would have been an exasperated tone, had the words been in a proper language.

"Yes... sanctified ones," the man answered, arm twitching, but managing to resist giving the gesture of respect in a warzone. "My _S'bepr'fh-crevbe_! The blasphemous machine... the one with the red eye, has fallen. The other two are moving towards it."

Phu-hului'yi would have opened his eyes wide, had he still possessed human eyelids. Instead, he contented himself with picking up the telephone beside him. It was, in fact, despite the military appearance, directly connected into the civilian network. The entire structure, built from the ground up after the Liberation of Iceland from the xeno Migou, had been designed to deal with a military situation.

"Jur-ervf, gur'ybir, gur'ybir, gur'ybir," he snapped down the phone, the authorisation almost frantic. "B'u Dagon on'gzna j'nagf 'zl urn-q!"

His command was answered by a choral blast, dwarfing the previous one which flooded the entire spectrum with noise in the brevity of their explosion. The Deep Ones, and the members of the proper military forces of the Order, still felt the slam of sound, even though their helmets had clamped down, while militia members were stunned by the magnitude of the blast. The human runner flinched, and almost lost his grip, scrabbling to remain at the top of the ladder.

The entire district which the blasphemous machines had been in was not engulfed in fire, burning bright-white under the plume which billowed upwards, blotting out the moon from where the forces of the faithful waited. The loss of that illumination was no real issue, though, as the chemical fires which now lit the area, a simple redox reaction enough to slag the area when applied in the vast quantities required to ensure that, running below the streets, there were pipes packed with powdered rust and aluminium, wrapped around the support structures of every single building.

The district had only even been a sacrificial one, designed to occupy a New Earth Government or Migou armoured force long enough for it to get bogged down and move as many reinforcements into the area as possible. The buildings had all been designed to make it hellish to clear them (which had caused no small amount of hassle for the individuals, almost all of low social status, who actually lived there), and the raid bunkers for the area had been located outside it. The charges collapsed the buildings, crushing any infantry which had moved into the location, while the rivers of thermite that ran below the streets ignited and melted the foundations. It was intended to collapse the entire district into a mass of wreckage and molten metal, wrecking the terrain and killing anything that had moved into such a place.

Nothing could survive that intact, not least the impracticality of a forty-metre walker, which had enough issues with ground pressure even before the streets assumed the consistency and approximate temperature of molten iron.

Only to be met by a sick, coruscating shimmering which lit the skies in a way quite unlike the blinding brightness of the masses of thermite, or the weapons that the loathsome constructs wielded. Three such lights, terrible in the way that they took the light from the molten streets, the hellish light of ruined cities and death, and twisted it through impossible interference patterns which shifted and interlinked, playing off each other in a way... which was... oddly... compelling. Two of these patterns leapt up out of the fire, in identical arcs, their movements synchronised as almost perfect reflections, while the third, stoically, continued forwards, wading through molten tar and metal and the like, the cracked light making it a darker shape in the brightness.

And it screamed. In the name of Dagon and Hydra, it screamed, a horrifying, muffled scream, which dwarfed even the sound of the blast. The psychic backlash of the leviathan filled the three space-like dimensions of the so-called World of Elements, intruded back and forwards through the time-like dimension; only minor echoes of the full magnitude of the agony that it imposed upon the things attuned to the fifth, and least-known dimension of the common frame of reference, that where the soul had its quantised existence and the emergent properties of complexity had their own, strange, unlives.

~'/|\'~

Alarms wailed in the Herkunft control centre, the cascading red across the AR projections painting itself afresh across the hard contacts and AR-glasses of the operators at the desks. And, down below, beyond the one-way mirror, blue and green warning signals flashed up on the monitoring panels, leaving the technical crew scurrying from station to station, clad in their thick , partially motorised, biohazard suits. They had been selected for resilience to external mental influence, but that didn't help, when to go to close to an unstable Sub-Commander would boil flesh and strip out muscle, leaving only a bloodied and charred skeleton.

"Attunement ratio is rising... no, falling... no rising again!" called out a blond man, pupils gleaming red, filled as they were with the light of the images projected against his hard contacts. "It won't stabilise!"

"Achilles is dropping... borderline six slash seven... damn, we've dropped to six! EM Double Ess scores for Subject Group C2 are dropping."

"Get it back up," ordered Dr Barriso. "Achilles is one of the Primary Sub-Commanders. We can't lose the Type VIIs!"

"We're prioritising the balance, sir, dropping co-ordination from other groups."

Philipe Barriso cocked his head. "How are the handling capacities for Orpheus and Heracles? Can we transfer some of Achilles' assets to those pools, until we can get back to Stage 7?"

There was ten long seconds of wait, as the complexities of animaneuralanalysis made their way through the computers, not helped by the flux in the attunement of all three Primary Sub-Commanders. Around this, there was chaos, as the operators tried to balance the needle-thin margins of error. Finally;

"We can do it, sir," a female operator finally responded, face pale. "We can bump most of the weight to Orpheus and delegate it downwards from there by normal procedures; it's more stable than Heracles, despite its raised LAAM." She sucked in a breath, shivering slightly. "Or maybe because of it."

The man ran a hand over his head, smoothing down his sweat-slick hair. "What do you mean, because of it?" he asked, gut sinking slightly. "And do it. If the Replicas shut down, then they'll be slaughtered."

The process of transferring control to the other Sub-Commanders, moving the units that could not be supported with the lowered attunement stage to ones with spare capacity began, somewhat mitigating the alarms which, although they were still there, at stopped warning of a potential large-scale shut-down.

Dr Barrisso took a breath, and repeated his question. "What do you mean, because of it?"

The operator paused, glancing around nervously as she was put on the spot. "Well, uh, the LAAM is the normalised overlap integral of the subject's animaneural waveform and that of the Lilitu Extradimensional Energy Source, converted into a percentage, yes?"

"Well, strictly speaking, no, not at all," the man answered. "But," he continued, breaking the slight flash of relief that emerged on the woman's face, "continue. It's accurate enough for rule of thumb, and it's a lot less complicated."

"Okay." She took a breath. "Well, in that case, a high LAAM should infer some kind of resilience to external sources of animaneural influence, shouldn't it? As, in a sense, they're already interacting with something else. I just noticed that the Sub-Commanders with the highest LAAM are the most stable, at the moment, and sort of put it together."

Dr Barisso paused. "Well," he began, "intuition like that is usually a pretty terrible way of solving problems. Especially arcane problems, which are almost completely counter-intuitive." He ran his tongue over his lips. "You might be right, though. It would explain a few things, especially about the Ligier-II Test Group." He waved his hand in the air, bringing up an AR panel, and began to run his way through the menus. "You can go back to work," he noted to the operator. "What is your name?" he added.

"Gladys Chell, Operations Department," she answered, with rather stiff smile. "On loan from the Achtzig Group."

"You're from Achtzig?" Dr Barriso said, somewhat surprised. "Well, I wish Alice would tell me these things when she puts new people in my Project." He sighed. "And on that subject," he said, now talking to the computer, "please send out a call for Alice Wade. No, Dr Alice Wade," he repeated, the voice recognition software getting confused in the noise, and getting the first name wrong. "No, I said Alice. A. L. I. C. E... Yes!" he snapped at the dumb system, before lowering his voice. He knew it was noisy in here, but it was unusual for the LAI to confuse such an "ice" sound. "Tell her that she is needed in Command, priority 1. Forwards the files to her, especially the ones on the Commander instability. Whatever she's doing can't be as important as this."

~'/|\'~

The red-eyed cyclops that was Evangelion Unit 00 emerged from the district, the natal shield of the AT-Field a path below it, breaking up the light and refracting it, casting strange shadows and interference patterns of light. The Dagonite soldiers that had been positioned outside the trap, to cut down that anything that tried to escape the heat, were disorganised, blood running freely from their eyes and mouths from the agony which the arcanocyberxenobiological organism had shared with the world. They fired as best they could, 18mm railguns and 120mm rockets spilling forth from their armoured positions, against the white-shimmering devil that strode forth from the flames. The slugs merely ricocheted off the nearly-frigate grade armour of the Type-D armour, but the missiles had far more success than they had in the fjord. The surface of the Evangelion was partially glassed, even the outer layers of ceramics vulnerable to the intense heat, and the laser defence grid was almost completely incapacitated, the surface weapons fused solid.

And still the beast screamed, an agonised noise that left sensitives all over the world waking in cold sweats.

Inside the entry plug, warning lights and temperatures gauges alike flashed red, a cacophony of LAI voices spewing unfocussed glossolalia as they all tried to warn of the many problems that the Unit was now afflicted with. The programs should have prioritised the deliverance of such information, to avoid overloading the pilot with useless information and distracting them from the combat.

Rei had turned those filters off, and now faced the information overload without limits. The view from the plug was hideously chaotic, the mess of overlays and vision modes sharp contrast to the measured professionalism of Unit 02, or the (to be honest) simplified for ease of use display that Unit 01 used.

"That was... unforeseen," she said in a tone which was suggestive of both shock and concern, as the Unit stepped out of the molten mix (which now covered its legs), its call ceasing as the girl within clamped down on the leviathan. "I did not expect that."

The charge beam was raised, and pointed at a SRM platform on the other side of a building. The shot collapsed the building, vaporised the defence system and a non-negligible cone around it, and left fifty men and hybrids dying from burns and radiation exposure.

"I see it when I close my eyes," Rei said softly, as the particle beam dumped the waste heat, clouds of coolant vented from the sides. A flick on the control levers turned down the power input to the weapon; a faster fire rate was needed. Plasma lashed out from the shoulder mounts, carving its way across the face of a bunker, the final shot breaking through and frying the men inside. "Fire sweeping over the earth," to her left, Unit 02 cut its way through an armoured column, the capital-grade firepower slaughtering a squadron of the rare true battlefield mecha that the Order possessed, "bodies in the streets," beside the Mass Production Unit, the Prototype cleaned up, cutting down anything which survived the sweeps of the lance-like plasmathrower, the explosion of some kind of warehouse covering the surrounding streets in shrapnel which mercilessly cut down the lightly armoured militia troops, "cities turned to dust."

The charge beam indicator was green again. She levelled it at a taller building in the midst of one of the camp-areas, near the outer edge of the city; one of the zones which she had been instructed not to fire at. But this was different. She zoomed in with little more than a thought, the projected scope from the charge beam displaying the slight thermal signatures on the roof. They deserved to die.

She depressed the trigger.

"Retaliation," she whispered.

~'/|\'~

Misato specifically did not look at anyone else in the command centre. Yes, she knew it was probably too much to hope for a group of teenagers to act like highly drilled military officers (even if, technically, one of them was). It's just that, after the blast, they were... well, before it, they had been taking it a little too lightly, for the Major's tastes. Now, though the aforementioned group of teenagers were currently slaughtering cultists who might as well have been unarmed and unarmoured, for all that they could do against the Evangelions.

She could see their calculated emotional states, from the physiological responses which were tracked at all times. They weren't pleasant, especially when you were the guardian of two of the teenagers out there. That couldn't be good for them, in the long run. Certainly, Rei was showing disturbing levels of indifference towards the slaves in the Dagonite camps. It wasn't that she was targeting them, it was that she made no effort to avoid firing the charge beam in a way that would cause casualties, if it would take out a more important target.

Misato knew that the fish-fucking freaks of the Esoteric Order of Dagon were inhuman monsters, who couldn't feel the least of sympathy or empathy or any positive human emotion, saving their every thought for the enslavement of humanity and their subjugation into their _vile_ rape camps. It was just that residual instincts told her that this was somewhat unfair. And other, more recent instincts told her that this was the guilt for how all three Children had been caught in the blast, deliberately lured into an area that the GIA hadn't discovered was a trap.

_Of course, modern control schemes for mecha are actually_ based _off computer game controls,_ she thought, a trace morbidly. _It's probably just for the best that they're not thinking about what they're doing. And at least the synchronisation training that Ritsuko put Asuka and Shinji through seems to be helping,_ she added mentally, watching on the screen the way that they split their fire based on their outfitted weapons.

"How _is_ it going, Major Katsuragi?" asked a voice over her shoulder, the words clipped and precise, even through the phonetic Nazzadi accent.

A chill ran down Misato's spine, before she managed to suppress it. She had told Asuka that, given that she had stared down the mouth of a Bhole (and much more, in the Fall of China), there were very few things that could scare her. And, yet, for some reason, this Nazzadi woman, devoid of any real distinguishing marks, the right age to be one of the AW1 generation, and dressed in neat, almost fussy black suits, was absolutely terrifying.

But all that showed was that fear could come from the higher mind just as much as from the more primal parts of the brain.

"Director Khoury." She suppressed the urge to salute; had Special Services existed, it would have been a civilian agency, unlinked to the military chain of command. She glanced at the subordinates that flanked the woman, both dressed in the undifferentiated black of Special Services. One was a male _sidoci_... no, he wasn't, she realised. The eyes were the wrong colour, a very pale blue, and the skin was just slightly coloured, in a way that someone who lacked melanin or... she couldn't remember what Nazzadi used... the other _Homo_ genus skin pigment looked, rather than the oddness of the White xenomixes. His hair cut to a stubble across his scalp, in direct contrast to his neatly trimmed beard. He looked somewhat familiar; she thought she recalled him from the audience of the briefing. Misato distrusted him instantly, to a large part because his face looked like it had been selected for being honest-looking.

The other was more unusual; an exceptionally tall woman, well over two metres, who loomed over both Misato and Director Khoury (and the male albino, when it came down to it). She had to be Germanic or Scandinavian, the Japanese woman decided, especially when her natural-looking blond hair, tied behind her in a neat pony-tail, was taken into account. The woman caught Misato's gaze with blue eyes behind AR-glasses, white-text scrolling down, before looking away.

Director Khoury caught her glance. "Agent Tome. Agent Andersdóttir," she said. "Agent Tome is a sorcerer, and will be in charge of coordinating the ritual from this end." There was no explanation for Agent Andersdóttir. "Now, I shall repeat my question; how do you feel that it's going?" She chuckled to herself; the kind of laugh made by very intelligent people who think of something of dubious humour content. "If I were some kind of walking stereotype, I would add something overblown like 'Very few ever get the privilege of me repeating the question without much pain'. But I'm not, so I shall not."

Misato frowned. "What?"

"It's a cliché." She paused. "I might add that I'm still waiting for the answer, though."

"Yes, Director," Misato said through gritted teeth. "The Evangelions are still advancing through the urban area; the hostile forces are putting up heavy resistance, and seem to be targetting the Units above the special forces that are also attacking. Unit 00 has received moderate damage from an anti-armour trap; the ACXB is intact, but lots of the built-in weapons aren't working any more, including large amounts of the laser-defence grid."

Director Khoury flinched slightly. "The charge-beam?" she asked, with an intense note in her voice.

"It's still working."

The other woman relaxed. "How do you feel it's going, Major?"

"We are still within the time constraints for our progress. If you want information on the rest of Task Force Nero, you should ask the officers in charge of those parts."

"Good, good. But, Major... don't you feel it's a little off for a mere Major to be in command of three capital grade units, by the way," she raised a hand, cutting off Misato, "Don't say anything, that was merely an observation; neither a threat nor an attempted hint at future rewards. But, Major, that's not what I asked. If I wanted a status update, I would look at the reports, instead of hassling one of the commanding officers and distracting them from their duties. No, what I asked was how _you_ felt it was going. Be honest." The eyes, a darker shade of red than typical, stared right at her.

Misato swallowed. This was a much more dangerous question to answer. Especially since she knew for certain that Special Services would have had access to her files and her history. They probably knew more about her than she did. She turned to look at the Evangelion staff, taking in the open comms link to the London-2 Geocity, using precious tightbeam access to one of the few satellites that the NEG could maintain in the face of Migou orbital supremacy.

"Major Katsuragi," said Lieutenant Aoba, half-swivelled on the chair. "It's Dr Akagi, over satellite. She says it's important."

"Major," said Director Khoury, a warning note in her voice.

Misato froze for a moment, before making her choice.

"Captain," she said to the NEGA officer assigned to the Evangelion team to assist in this mission. "You're temporarily in command here. Aoba, Makota, Gong, and the rest. Keep it stable, inform me if the situation changes." She then stepped away from the command deck, following the Nazzadi and her accompanying agents to an alcove, away from both the noise and the potential listeners of the surrounding military. Misato was under no illusions that the entire place wasn't being recorded, but if Special Services had existed, this woman would certainly have had the clearance to discuss this level of thing. More than enough, actually; such a group would have effective access to whatever they wanted.

Once away from the hubbub of the command centre, she stared the Director, from Special Services, right in the eye. "You want to know what I think about how it's going?"

Director Khoury indicated her assent.

"I think it's going as well as could be hoped in a mission which has been handicapped in this way. You know that I was involved in the planning. You also know that we planned to kill the thing, before we were overridden. I do understand," she said, raising a hand, "that if we could capture a Herald, it could potentially be a war-winner. You said as much in the briefing. I just don't think that _summoning_ it ourselves, while in the middle of an _active combat zone_, using," she swallowed, "_child soldiers_ on the frontline, in a territory worryingly close to Migou-controlled areas, is the way to do it. Take the Kathirat, for example," Misato said, counting it off on a finger, "the NEGN crippled it when they ambushed it. If we'd had standing orders at the time, and more than one active Evangelion, it's entirely possible that we could have captured it then. But now?" She shook her head. "It compromises the mission, endangers the larger operation of CATO, risks my pilots unnecessarily, and feels rushed. Because I'm clear about it; as both a Major in the New Earth Government Army, and Director of Operations for Project Evangelion, my job is to see the Heralds dead. Every last one. We shouldn't prevent anything which would stop us from killing, through any means necessary, all of them. Because they don't deserve to live. They deserve to die; all of them!" Misato took a deep breath, panting a little, and stared at the Director and the two subordinates she had with her.

That had... maybe gone a little too far.

Director Khoury shrugged. "As expected. But it won't prevent you from executing your duties, will it, Major Katsuragi?"

She stared blankly at the Nazzadi. That... wasn't how she thought they'd react. Though it did make sense, logically; it just required a worrying degree of self-control. "No, Director. As an officer of the New Earth Government, I will carry out my orders to the best of my ability, in accordance with both the spirit and the letter."

"Good. Your feelings about this are irrelevant. You have your orders; the importance that we obtain a live Herald-type entity overrides any lesser feelings from your history. Do you understand this?"

The Major nodded, still staring at the Director. She _had_ got carried away, Misato decided. It was likely that her psychological profile had flagged this up, and they had decided to clear it up now, because that was exactly the sort of thing that the reputation of the Office of Secret Services said it did.

Because, after all, if she failed in this, she wouldn't be able to watch (at least by autocensored proxy) as they vivisected the Herald codenamed Moloch, tore its secrets from it and used it to wipe out every last one of its class of entity. That would be much more satisfying than a clean death for the thing at the hands of an Evangelion.

Out loud, she said, "Yes. Clearly."

"Good. Agent Tome will accompany you back; he will advise on the procedure when you have control over the correct ritual site." The Nazzadi smiled. "I will be going, along with Agent Andersdóttir. I wouldn't want it to look like there existed a civilian agency with the authority to command high-level officers in the NEGA and NEGN."

She permitted herself a cat-like smile.

"It's just as well that there isn't, then."

~'/|\'~

"Foxtrot 813, report!"

A pause.

"Foxtrot 813, report!"

"No response. Unit is designated MIA until further confirmation on vital status is obtained."

"Foxtrot 811, this is Command. Reports indicate that your squad was close to the explosive in target district Bravo-Zeta-0-2. Report status, over."

"Command, this is Foxtrot 811. Units Foxtrot 814 and 815 are KIA. Unit Foxtrot 813 is MIA. Unit Foxtrot 816 has suffered a mission kill to his REV-8, and is continuing on foot. Foxtrot 811 and 812 remain mission effective, although damaged. Requesting evac, as we are reduced to less than 50% effective combat strength, over."

"Negative, 811. Evac will not be provided. You are to proceed to the new waypoint, and meet up with ORPH-HC1-029, who have also taken casualties. You will then provide assistance to JSN-AR2-043 and -045 who are pinned down by heavy Order opposition, as previously instructed."

"Understood, Command. ORPH-PN1-012 Foxtrot-811 out."

~'/|\'~

Down below the waves, above the Deep One city, something had to give. The NEGN had to act, or their foes would. And the Deep Ones did. From far below, down in _Guh'thya-leh'yi_, hatches popped open, phalanxes of torpedoes launching together. This was one area where the Deep Ones matched humanity and exceeded them, their low profile torpedoes, enhanced by unknown sorceries, were far more difficult than was reasonable to detect. They had hidden down below the oceans for a very long time, and although humanity had received hints of their existence even before the First Arcanotech War, they had maintained their masquerade. It had been their own choice to join in the Aeon War; they could withdrawn from it, and watched it in peace. Though that was not true, not really. If the Migou won, excising the threat of humanity by pruning them back to a state where they posed no threat to the purpose of the Exclusion Volume, then the Yuggothian fungoids would most certainly eradicate the Chosen. There would be no controlled barbarity for them, no life, monitored by watchers who would prevent them from posing a danger to the Migou (and, coincidentally, themselves). No, they would be wiped out, every last trace removed.

It was ironic, really. The Chosen of Dagon knew that the New Earth Government and its coddled humanity had far, far more in common with them than with any other side in the Aeon War. As species, they were kin, and through the blessings of the Gods, could even interbreed. All that they need do was accept the true faith, and that was no great thing; they had already proved that they were capable of such. Yet they insisted on violence against the cause of righteousness; their ignorance of the universe and the true horrors out there merely leading them to perform acts which blasphemed the Gods and endangered themselves. And now? With the atrocities which the frantic reports to _Guh'thya-leh'yi_ screamed about, the indiscriminate massacre of the innocents in the submarine section of _Cthulhu'ybeq Ahefrel_,the dread clouds of nanological, micrological, biological and chemical weapons which filled the streets on land, and now this assault against one of the sunken cities of the Chosen?

The arrogance. The monstrous arrogance. It had been less than one generation since the humans had discovered sorcery in any widespread fashion, and yet they had the presumption to attack their elder siblings, who had much more experience and truly understood the universe; how it worked and the costs that must be paid for survival. They were arrogant children, and, so like children, must be disciplined.

And that wave that had screamed through the minds of the sensitives of _Guh'thya-leh'yi_, that had killed many, including a Star-Spawn, insides liquefied by the force that had mutilated and consumed its own soul... that was truly alarming. The New Earth Government could not be permitted to interfere with the sacred tasks of the Chosen. They must act now, for that had been a signal!

Limited Artificial Intelligences triggered sirens throughout the fleet, as they took command from their human handlers and shifted the flock patterns, scattering. It took valuable seconds before the humans in the loop reacted to the sirens, screaming of a detected threat, and by then the LAI systems tied to the propulsion had already executed hard manoeuvres, slamming the naval officers (all in the mandatory acceleration couches, or stabilised power armour) back. The smaller units, the one-man mecha and submarines took longer to respond (the Operator Side Effect in particular posing a problem for LAI automation), but they had already been in evasive patterns. A blast of water, the shockwave felt all around, spoke of the death of the _Equinox Sight_, the impact of a torpedo enough for the lasers and charge beams down below to tag it, the particle beam tearing right through the bridge, buried in the middle of the ship.

"Go! Go! Go!" ordered Captain Koru, pulling his Engel down, A-Pods at maximum, organic parts retracting for maximum hydrodynamic efficiency. All throughout the vanguard, the Engels were diving, Hamshalliam in a desperate rush to get into the city itself, away from the open water where they could be picked off, while the Ish support squadrons were more sedate, emptying their racks in an attempt to take out what defences they could before following them in. Zuly tucked in behind him, pulling Azrael down and activating the LAI evasion override systems as torpedoes and lasers filled the water.

**pain! kill!** emoted the Engel below her, the emotions rushing through his mind with an intensity that they had never done before, making her blood rush and adrenaline flow through her system. As a lesser chorus, to the overarching theme, it added**terror!** and **revenge!** Throughout the Engel formations the same was experienced, a sudden desire of the Hamshalliam to see the city below burn, reduce it to ash and leave only the corpses of its inhabitants, floating lifeless, in its watery streets, to be eaten by the things that live in the depths of the ocean. The Ish, on the other hand, only felt **terror**, as something vast brushed against their crippled minds.

The human forces did not simply sit back and take the fire from the Dagonite forces, of course, as the swarms of LAI weapons systems went active, sub-munitions bombarding down on the city below, aiming for any heat sources, while larger torpedoes zeroed in on the launch sights and the weapons emplacements. The BCNaM agents thickened and darkened the waters, obscuring the blasts that rippled across the towers, only visible through the cameras on the probes that sent their telemetry back to the manned units.

The New Earth Government had decided at the highest levels, back in 2084, that the Earth's biosphere was, fundamentally, replaceable. The populace (that they cared about) lived in arcologies, which had been specifically designed to survive without external inputs (the Wade air recycling organisms entirely self-sufficient when fed with energy from a D-Engine), while the Rapine Storm and the Dagonites were dependent upon the pre-existing biosphere. The ecological damage that such a BCNaM attack would cause was viewed as the lesser evil.

And against such monstrosity, such wilful disregard for any life that was not themselves and against the planetary biosphere, the Deep Ones initiated their own defences.

A brief flash of light illuminated the depths. And then the shockwave came, tossing aside the torn-apart remains of mecha and ships and submarines like toys.

A second flash.

A third.

~'/|\'~

"Shockwave! We've got a massive detonation... holy fuck! Another one! We have two detonations right in the middle of... a third! A third! Three detonations right in the middle of Task Force Maximus."

The central control room for Operation CATO, back on the British mainland, as opposed to the shipboard ones running the Task Forces, was filled with alarm sirens and the confused babble of human voices.

"Each one was multiple kilotonnes. Telemetry from the sensor probes is giving us three, multiple kilotonne blasts. Look to be of the order of 10 kT. Multiple 10 kilotonne blasts."

"Yes, we have a burst on the surface. Water displacement is characteristic of deep-sea nuclear blasts. Some kind of torpedo or depth charge."

"The Dagonites have nukes! Fuck, intel didn't give us a warning about this! At most, they said they'd deploy chemicals or biologicals, and ground troops are NBCNaM-proofed."

"They've never done that before!" Field Marshal Kora said, his voice twisted with anger, to his counterpart in the NEGN Command Triumvirate, watching over the scene on the floor.

"Casualties figures are coming in. We've lost the _Equinox Sight_, the _Creation_, the _Ascension_, the _Awakening_..."

"The vanguard has engaged in full. They're into the city itself; the defences are prioritising on the capital ships and the support units. The Engel squadrons have launched a full-on attack to break the firing lines."

"Pull them back, pull them back! We can't take the city without the capital support," ordered Admiral Tatuta

"We can't do that, sir. They'll be shredded by the defences if they head into open water."

There was a groan.

"We're committed, then." Field Marshal Kora, the representative from the NEGA (European) Triumvirate sucked in a breath, looking at Admiral Tatuta. There was a nod from the other man. "That's it, then. Continue the attack, but be ready to pull out when possible. We have to destroy those silos." He paused, eyes filled with vengeful wrath. "And I personally authorise the deployment of κraken. Let's see how those fish-fuckers and their tentacled god like this."

Admiral Tatuta shook his head, vigorously. "No!" he snapped. "You know just as well as I do that to deploy κraken would take at least two Triumvirate-level authorities, and I'm not giving _that_ authorisation. It's not that severe, and we are certainly not going to fucking devastate the oceanic ecosystem in the way that use of κraken would."

"Don't you get it!" snapped back Kora. "The seas aren't ours any more. They haven't been, since the start of AW2. It's better that κraken get them, than the Dagonites get to use them like they do!"

"Get some sense of proportion!" The other officers in the command centre were staring at the arguing Field Marshal and Admiral, now.

"They nuked us," hissed Kora. "They haven't dared do that since '87, and we made them pay for New Miami in full. We should respond in kind, and the Migou won't object to κraken like they would to our own nuclear retaliation!"

"Listen to what you're saying. You know damn well what κraken would do to the world, and you'd still release it." The Admiral looked up at the ceiling. "Goalenu," he said, forcing his voice to be level, as he spoke to the LAI system that was so heavily integrated into the higher command functions that the two were, if not indistinguishable, at least rather hard to tell apart. "I would like to raise a concern about the mental health of Field Marshall Kora. I believe he has had a nervous breakdown, and..."

The other man glared at him. "I retract my suggestion that we deploy κraken, then."

"Yes," snapped the admiral. "You know, the entire reason for the Triumvirate system is to stop ill-thought out things like that." He turned to another officer, taking a deep breath and setting his face. "Inform the other Task Forces of the fact that the Dagonite forces have used nuclear weapons. We're going to have to be very careful here."

The confusion rippled out, into the military as a whole, and into the other Task Forces in Operation CATO. An outside onlooker might have noticed the slight hesitation that the ground forces in Task Force Scipio, engaged in a heavy assault on the capital, the Reykjavik pseudo-arcology, as their commanders spread units out and avoided concentrating their forces for fear of more atomic weapons, while the air forces in Task Force Marcellus held to more conservative patterns, in preparation to cover a retreat.

Task Force Nero did not hesitate. They had their mission, and they knew of its importance. And the higher-ups in Nero knew that, technically, the other three Task Forces were but bait, to distract. They'd known about the launch capacities of _Guh'thya-leh'yi_, after all; their sea-based missile capacity, equally capable of being deployed against land forces as against the naval units was a major threat, especially if the Dagonites were to work out the real purpose of CATO.

To be ruthlessly utilitarian, every nuclear weapon that was used against Maximus would not be used against Nero. And that was exactly how the planners wanted it. They would have preferred that Maximus destroy _Guh'thya-leh'yi_, and so neutralise the weapons that way. In fact, they hadn't expected the Dagonites to launch yet, that they would have to be pressed harder before they would risk revealing their strategic deterrent, but by forcing a launch in self-defence, the NEG now knew how the Dagonites hid their missile silos; the flare of sorcerous warding detected as it was temporarily lowered, enough that the waveform could be isolated. It had been a very careful balance to keep the forces far enough apart that damage could be reduced, while making them a tempting target that still would take multiple missiles (and thus multiple launches) to eliminate.

A good fraction of a NEGN task force, including multiple frigates and even more lesser units, was fair payment for such information, it was reckoned.

~'/|\'~

It was a good party, it was widely agreed (at least by the people who had obtained the highly exclusive invites). The Annual Gala For The Development of Nazzadi Culture was one of the best events in the social calendar, and this, the fifteenth iteration, was no exception. Despite the name, it was by no means composed exclusively of the dark-skinned siblings of humanity; this was a place where the influential and powerful mingled. A sceptic might even say that the event was an excuse for social influence and back-room dealing, but that would be a little too cynical. Many a young Nazzadi (and nowadays, xenomixed) artist had got their first break through the auspices of the Society for the Development of Nazzadi Culture

At the moment, a young group of _sidoci_ were putting on a display of _jakari_, the "traditional" Nazzadi performance art which combined music and bladeplay through the means of hollowed tubes, which moaned and whistled as they passed through the air, interspersed by the staccato beats of the _amijakari_, the instruments, clashing. It was somewhat eerie to an ear unfamiliar with it; the beat slightly off from what might be expected, and the rapid shifts in pitch, as the _amijakari_ were swung around, was not the most harmonic sound.

Oh, and the fact that every person on stage was a pyrokinetic made everything _so_ much more exciting. Which was another way of saying that everyone on stage was on fire, in clothes which were not fireproofed and, in fact, in certain areas, had actually been covered in an accelerant. A disturbing number of people had already remarked that one or another of the group was "hot", thus proving that bad humour and lechery (considering the average age of the onlookers to the young _sidoci_) was universal among the human subspecies.

One of the onlookers, a woman in a smart red suit, with her head rested against her jaw, was tapped on the shoulder by an adjunct, a brief whispered message into her ear. Tucking a loose hair behind an ear, she stood up. She had a mild headache; the lights and heat were a little too much in her opinion, but she hadn't got to her current position by letting her emotions show.

"What, are you not enjoying the display?" said one of her companions, a tall Nazzadi with Caucasian features, and a shirt pulled wide open to display what looked like ornate tattooing covering his chest. Looking closer, though, an onlooker could see the tiny topics running along the marks and across the other parts of his chest; thin, almost unnoticeable structures which could be used to alter local skin colouration to produce the tattoo-like effect.

The woman shook her head. "It's not that at all," she said, calmly. "Actually, I'm rather annoyed at having to leave, and sincerely apologise for this. It's apparently urgent. I'm sorry about this, Yavana; please tell your artists that I enjoyed their performance greatly, and look forwards to following their future career. Such a group should do wonders at banishing the residual prejudice against both _sidoci_ and parapsychics."

"That is the point of the Society for the Development for Nazzadi Culture, yes?" the man replied, with a smirk. "'Through Culture, Harmony'," he added, repeating their motto.

"Quite," she said, nodding, as she adjusted her jacked, and slipped away with the adjunct, in between a pair of other guests, their jackets perhaps a little tight on their bulky figures. Behind her, a wave of heat washed over the audience, as the music built to a crescendo and the _sidoci jakari_-artists built up the intensity of the fire, burning a blue-white which cast the room into a stark relief.

Once outside, she ran her hands over her face, wiping away the layer of sweat which had accumulated there. "That was a little warm," she said to one of the guests who had followed her.

The man, a Nazzadi with the natural dark hair of his kind, nodded stiffly. "Yes, ma'am."

"Anyway," the woman continued, turning to the adjunct, "what is it, Tomás? This gala is an important one, and the Nazzadi press will be all over me if I'm not suitably there. You know they're already aggravated by those murders in Brasilia-A, and it's only going to get worse if the FSB can't find those monsters."

"I apologise, Madam President," the adjunct said calmly, "but this is highest priority. I have the Minister of War on the hotline, along with NEGAFC-Europe."

The woman, Helen Nyanda, President of the New Earth Government and leader of the Unification Party, sighed. "Oh. Damn. There goes any hope of a quiet evening. Or probably of getting any sleep tonight."

"That is indeed probable, Madam President. We have a secure link prepared, and a data-stream compatible with your hard contacts. It will be necessary to brief you on a Code SANDALPHON operation."

The President's eyes opened wide. "Sandalphon? That's one of the ultra-high NEGA clearance ones, isn't it." Not letting the adjunct answer her rhetorical question, she made a disgusted noise. "What has Genevieve done? What has happened!"

"It will be explained, Madam President," the adjunct said smoothly. "Now, follow me, please. This is a somewhat urgent situation, and protocol demands that you be bought up to speed as soon as possible."

~'/|\'~

Behind the Evangelions, the city of _Dagon'uvtu Oraribyrapr_ was aflame.

To a large extent, it was their fault.

Nevertheless, despite the hideous levels of violence and atrocities such as the gratuitous use of capital-grade weapons against foot infantry, it had been nothing more than a distraction, an obstacle that needed to be removed so that the true purpose of Operation CATO could be carried out. And now that it was past, it was time for that very purpose.

The Children weren't going to be told about the nuclear weapons. It would just alarm them unnecessarily.

"Shinji, Rei, Asuka," said Misato, her head popping up on the AR viewscreen inside the Units. "The location of the first potential ritual site has been marked on your maps. We've had some luck, actually; the air cover cleared the skies ahead of schedule. Looks like the Dagonites had even less aircraft than we expected, and we overestimated their AA coverage. You have gunship support, as well as recon drone coverage."

It was Asuka who asked the question. "What use is gunship coverage? We're more armed than them, even without the capital-grade weapons, and they restrict how the big guns can be used." She glanced to the west, where the light of the burning pseudo-arcology, which was what had once been Reykjavik, could be seen over the mountains. The official main attack force of CATO had obviously been almost as busy at they had. "Back me up here, Shinji."

"Uh..." he started. "Well, the plasma minigun is certainly useful..."

Misato shook her head. "They're Hyenas. Anti-armour precision platforms. They're there to take down mecha that might try to slow you down or perform a holding action."

"Just as long as they don't get in our way," Asuka grudgingly conceded.

"They will not obstruct our mission... I think," stated Rei, an odd note underlying her voice.

Misato stared at the pale girl, eyes narrowed, trying to read her emotions off the porcelain mask that stared back at the elder woman. "I haven't forgotten about you," said the Major. "Rei, you were issued the charge beam because it was felt that you were the most level-headed, and least likely cause friendly fire incidents with it."

"And because I have the lowest synchronisation ration," the girl said, in a monotone. "And so you told Dr Akagi that it would be best if I were given the weapon least sensitive to the increased reaction time produced by the deficiency in my synchronisation with the arcanocyberxenobiological organism."

"That was a lesser factor, yes", admitted the Major. "However, you have, on multiple occasions, fired it at Red zones. You knew that there were civilians or friendly forces in those areas, even if there were hostiles, you should have used other weapons. Does innocent life mean nothing to you?"

Rei looked back, an almost puzzled expression on her face, as if she were trying to solve a difficult question "I... was angry," she said, finally. "The... explosion hurt. I was not thinking clearly, and forgot to reduce the yield. It was an error, and I shall endeavour to avoid in in future," she continued, expanding on the same hesitant theme.

Misato only gazed back. Frankly, she didn't believe a word of it.

_She isn't that emotionless_, she thought, _and she knows what things like that are. I saw the pain she was in, after the accident with Unit 00. She has the full range of human emotions, from her psych profile, and, anyway, Whites are still human... uh, well, human sub-species, just a bit... distant. Not emotionless robots or anything like that._

And I could see the feedout from her plug. She wasn't angry. She was feeling something... but it wasn't anger.

...how much of the rest _of her behaviour is a lie?_

The deadlock was broken by the roar of the plasma minigun, as Shinji poured fire into the mountains ahead, the curve of the stream of projectiles visible in the pre-dawn darkness.

"There are a bunch of red icons up there," he said through gritted teeth, squinting at the shapes on the AR display on the plug wall. "Mostly slashes... uh, infantry, with some squares and triangles."

Impact craters of slagged volcanic glass and flash-ionised water vapour covered the slope ahead of them like plague scars, ten-metre wide holes that slagged the bunkers and the forces that were fleeing from the ruins of _Dagon'uvtu Oraribyrapr_. If the brightness of the plasma weapon had not forced the photovisors of those with protection to clamp down (to prevent them from being blinded, like those who did not), then the clear path of glowing sores on the mountainside, an angry orange, would have been clearly visible.

Shinji was briefly tempted to write his name on the hillside. He fought it off, though not without some internal debate.

"I see them, I see them," said Asuka, the head of Unit 02 turning away from the sight of the city, and tracking back and forth; a largely unnecessary action, when the fact that the sensor system of the Evangelion was producing most of the information on the plug wall, not the eyes. "I'm having problems acquiring them... are you getting a steady lock?"

Shinji nodded, the gesture reflected in the actions of the warmachine. "Yes, pretty good."

Asuka frowned. "They're dropping in and out for me," she said, as she triggered the lesser weapons on the Evangelion, LAI aiming systems freed from the constraints imposed upon them by the human in the cockpit. "I think... yes, that's it. I've lost long range sensor coverage down my front, Misato," she reported. "I'm only getting things from left and right; about 40 degrees, right down the middle, just isn't working."

"Are you sure, Asuka?" asked the Major. "The instruments are working, according to the data from the Eva."

"Well, they're certainly not working for me," she retorted. "Go talk to Doctor Akagi, then, and ask her why they're not showing things right in front of me. Come on, move," she added to her fellow pilots, breaking into a run that ate up the distance at a considerable pace, the massive legs of the Evangelion breaking the ground. "We can't just stand around, and let infantry on foot delay us. And maybe it'll work, up close."

"Uh, Asuka," said Shinji. "I can see multiple squares and triangles, too. Not just infantry" He paused. "Does that mean that I'm the only one with a fully working sensor grid, then," he asked. "Rei's was damaged in the blast, and if yours isn't working properly too..." he let his voice tail off, as the LAI systems engaged the targets it could see.

"Possibly," said Misato, a concerned look on her face. "We didn't expect the trap, and it's done quite a lot of damage to the surface mounts that the Type-D added. I'll get you E-9 coverage to patch the sensor loss," the Major added, closing the link. She turned to the technicians that Project Evangelion had bought with it. "Makota, put in a request, highest priority for a Sentinel to be assigned to the Evangelions. If the air is clear, then they don't have to sit back so much."

"Yes, Major Katsuragi," the Nazzadi remarked, adjusting his AR glasses slightly. "They're not going to like it," he warned. "You know how people fight over E-9s."

"They don't have to like it. Tell them to take one of the birds from the D-O monitoring; now that the Evangelions are through, the special forces there have filled their main role. They can pull back and consolidate, and so won't need as much TAWACS coverage, yes." She sniffed. "And, since the Evangelions were nice enough to cut a path right through the heart of D-O for them, they should be grateful enough to spare us at least one E-9."

"May I?" asked a voice, from behind her. It was the albino sorcerer from the OSS, the special operative. What was his name? Book, wasn't it... no, it was Tome, she recalled. The one who was just in the normal boundaries of creepy for a sorcerer, as opposed to the transcendental creepiness of Director Khoury. He stepped forwards, without waiting for an answer, handing a PCPU to Makota. "Use this code for requests for assets for Operation Nero. It should ease things."

Misato, smiled, surprised. "Looks like there's some use to having you around, after all."

"I aim to please," he said, with a completely straight face. An effect which was ruined after only a second, when the corner of his mouth twitched up into a smirk.

"Uh, Major Katsuragi," said Lieutenant Aoba, from further along the row of control panels. "Dr Akagi is still trying to contact you."

_Oh, good_, thought Misato. _She's going to be annoyed._

Dr Akagi appeared as a floating head on one of the lesser screens. From her expression and somewhat disturbed hair, she was not in the best of moods.

"Ah, Major Katsuragi," she exclaimed, each word dripping with sarcasm. "So very nice of you to talk to me. I do like these conversations between the Director of Operations and the Director of Science, during the middle of the operation, when the Director of Science has something urgent to tell you."

Misato managed a sigh. "I'm sorry. I had to deal with a woman from Special Services trying to talk to me and make veiled comments-which-honestly-aren't-suggestions _right after_ Unit 00 got caught in an booby-trapped explosion, _and then_ deal with the Children and set their next directives. And have a talk with Rei," she added darkly.

The scientist's face softened. "A woman from the Office of Special Services?" she asked. "I'd heard that they were involved, but... they were actually interfering in command decisions?" She sucked in a breath. "That's skirting what they're allowed to do, unless it was authorised by a high-up in the government. I think they'd need... regional, if not ministerial authority." A faint smirk appeared. "Are you sure that she _wasn't_ from the Office of Special Services?"

"No, I'm pretty sure she was. The paperwork authorised as her as one of the Directors, too."

"No, I meant, she _wasn't_..." began Ritsuko, before Misato interrupted.

"No, Rits. She most certainly was," she snapped. "And, yes, the OSS does exist, and it isn't funny, and that joke gets used far too much, and it's just annoying, and I'm not in the mood. Now, are you going to tell me what you got angry about, or are you going to let me get back to handling three capital-grade units manned by teenagers?"

The shock on Ritsuko's face flashed across it; this was somewhat akin to being bitten by a fairly friendly cat (not that such a thing didn't happen, she thought). The expression was mimicked by the other Ashcroft Project staff moved up here for C they'd never really seen the Major go for Dr Akagi like that. The needling and sarcasm was normally only a one-sided affair. "Good," she managed. "Right. Firstly, we've managed to work out what the effects of the damage is on the operation capabilities of the Units. Beyond the loss of obviously functionality; I mean. We've run the physics simulation on the data from the Evas. Zero-Zero is in the worst state, but both Unit 01 and Unit 02 have taken minor epidermal damage." She paused. "Uh, that's surface damage."

"I know what 'epidermal' means," retorted Misato, anger still somewhat evident. "And, actually, it means 'skin'."

"Well, yes. The bad news. Unit 00's point defence grid is going to be giving worse then 20% coverage. They couldn't have designed a better weapon to wreck it if they tried. The fine particulate the first blast kicked up was nasty enough, but the second one? Well, it just fused most of the laser grid straight away, especially since the system tried to tried to track some of the larger chunks."

"That woman from Engel told me that they'd sorted that problem," Misato said darkly. "False acquisition was a problem with those grids even back in '86; that's why they never saw widespread mecha use."

"Probably." Ritsuko sighed. "In addition, the heat melted... well, I have a long list here, but it sums to "Keep Eva 00 away from anything that might hit it in the legs". Keep the First Child back as far as possible."

"Well yes," Misato said, with laboured patience. "I was intending to hold the one with the long-ranged in-theory-precision weapon back."

"In theory?" Ritsuko frowned. "What do you mean, in theory?"

"Rei appears to have some problems with the concept of don't-shoot-the-Rei-Gun-near-the-people-in-the-camps," said Misato, lips pursed.

"Are you sure?" asked Dr Akagi. "She's normally... well, excellent at following instructions. What rules of engagement did you give her?"

"They should be in the batch of files I got Aoba to send you the day before yesterday," Misato said, gazing up at the ceiling for a second, as she thought back. "I manually tagged it and everything; 'ROE'."

"Yes, I thought I'd read it," the scientist said, after only just a moment looking away from the screen. "Nothing unusual. That's... unlike her. I'll need to get another psych profile done as soon as she gets back to L2," she added, a momentary expression flashing across her face that Misato couldn't read.

"No. But there's something even more serious."

"Another thing?" Ritsuko said, rolling her eyes.

"Yes. You know the damage the Evas took. Well, Asuka's noticed that she's getting a blank arc; 40-or-so degrees, in the front arc of her sensors. Just the long range ones; they're losing things when they're right in front of her."

"In front of her, relative to head or torso," the blond asked, all traces of levity gone.

"Makota?" Misato asked.

The Nazzadi's hands flew across the console. "Uh... torso, judging from the dialogue transcripts and the feeds, Major."

Ritsuko nodded. "Yes, that would be what it would be if it were the actual sensors playing up, rather than a problem in the feed. I'll get Maya right on it."

"You know, it would be a lot easier if we actually had some Magi technicians up here," Misato said.

"Yes, I'm sure it would," Ritsuko replied, archly. "But there's no way that we'd let the Magi run a datastream all the way to Scotland, then broadcast it to a ship, even over tightbeam. Do you have any idea of the security risks that would entail? And that's not even mentioning the lag that the Magi Operators would have to suffer; it'd play hell with them and attempts to use the Magi to their full potential. The DMIN suffers over the distances in L2, let alone the kind of multiple-link long-range network that this kind of thing would require."

"I know, I know." Misato sighed. "It was just a grumble, after all."

~'/|\'~

In a hidden chamber, dug deep into the hard volcanic rock of Iceland, the concentric circles of Deep One sorcerers swayed and chanted, their inhuman cadences transmitted through the waters of the vast flooded chamber and reflected by the walls; focussed on the massive figure in the centre.

_Jr-bs'sre hagb l'bh, DAGON-ybeq'uvt-urfg, bhe ce'nlref. Gnx'r bhg gur be-tbar sebz bhe f'bhyf naq gnxr vg hagb g'urr, gb jnxr gur ur-enyq, va freivpr gb CTHULHU-ybeq'fhcerzr_, they chanted, over and over again, unceasing in their devotion to their patriarch and his lord. _Jr-bs'sre hagb l'bh, DAGON-ybeq'uvt-urfg, bhe ce'nlref. Gnx'r bhg gur be-tbar sebz bhe f'bhyf naq gnxr vg hagb g'urr, gb jnxr gur ur-enyq, va freivpr gb CTHULHU-ybeq'fhcerzr._

With each beat of the sonorous drum, they forced their ruach, the energy of their souls, through the sanctified channels that ran from each of the positions. When one fell or released the engraved golden rods before them, they were replaced before the drum beat again. No human sorcerer, they knew, could have maintained such a flow of ruach for so long. Not even their hybrid children, even when they were fully mature, could do this. The hybrids were emotionally stunted and backwards, mentally crippled children who crammed several hundred years of maturation into a few mere decades. They were useful, true, but they were not really worthy of the mastery that came with the Blood of Dagon. These sorcerers came from all over the globe, the wise among the sunken Deep One cities.

And even they were not enough, on their own. So the lifeforce of human slaves were being used, a crude implement to boost the reserves of the sorcerer-priests, who could refine it and channel it properly. It was trivial to remove the limited ruach that the human soul could temporarily contain, if one did not mind the death of the inferior being. The sorcerer-priests could feel the pulse from the air-filled outer sanctum, as blessed machines of gold and emerald and steel dug their way into the nervous systems of the sacrificed, filling them with a moment of transcendental bliss as their blood gushed from the wounds the machines made and the release of arcane energies fried their brains.

The figure in the middle felt the rush from his children, and reached further down. It was still not far enough! They were forced to keep on moving the location for the ritual, as the geomantic warding proved too strong for one such as him. He was only the most favoured servant of his master, after all, and although some of his powers were invested in this most unworthy servant, the powers of the Endless Ones delegated to one such as him, he was not truly worthy.

They would keep on pushing. That much was necessary. The one below, the _Ancient-One-Who-Slept-In-Fire_, who dwelt in the molten rock just as he and his kin dwelt in the ocean, was an ally of his master. No, ally was not the right word, insofar as such terms applied to such beings so far beyond his own comprehension. Nevertheless, if he invoked the _Ancient-One-Who-Slept-In-Fire_, with the authority of his master, it would awaken. And that was all that was needed.

If only he could break the wards which the _Ancient-One-Who-Slept-In-Fire_ had erected through its will!

~'/|\'~

Paxton Fettel, the Primary Commander for Project Perseus, a designated handler for the creations of Project Eidelon, Animagenoneural Reference Source for Projects Harbinger and Paragon, and the Second Infant for Project Herkunft, got up from the control couch, stepping through the suit (more akin to a power armour than clothing) which fed him data, restrained his limbs, and provided him with nutrition for long-time operations.

It was but matter, merely present in the three dimensions of space and one of time that pre-Arcane Theory mankind had known about, and he was more than that.

His steps were calm, confident, and silent, as he stepped over to the Herkunft operators, monitoring the progress of the Replicas in Iceland, empowered by his soul and mind and will, and the various mechanisms the Group had used to replicate them in others. Reaching out with one hand, he brushed aside the short black hair of a female operator sat near to him, eyes fixed on the feedout monitoring the characteristics of the Second Infant within the control suit, and lent down, mouth against her ear.

"Wake up," he said, softly. "Rise and shine."

The operator stiffened slightly, as a terrible feeling of cold water ran over her skin, her bones feeling like they were on fire. She wanted to scream; she couldn't.

"What a... boring. No, mundane, that is a better term. What a _mundane_ mind we have here," he said softly, no-one else in the room hearing his whispered words. "Except it's not." He smiled. "They set you up, you know. They never trusted you to oversee _this_ part of the operation. How much did they pay you, I wonder? Ah," he added, rummaging through her thoughts, "no, they didn't pay you. You're doing this because you believe."

He smiled, teeth bared as his lips curled up.

"But why is it that you believe? They removed all choice from you, didn't they? And you don't even know that. You're as much an object, a machine as the computer you sit at. You are a puppet, a little doll suspended from cables that move your limbs for you and I can see the strings."

The woman, frozen as his mind reached deep into hers, reached down, and began to type a note, that there was nothing unusual with the Second Infant, noting time and date.

"But I didn't need to do that, did I? You wanted to do that. Your sense of self is an illusion that lags behind the interactions between your soul, and your body. That's why you left a little backdoor that let me do this without alarms being triggered, exactly so that I could do this. Because you are a child's drawing, sketched over the complexity and beauty of a masterwork in neurons and charges and emergent structure."

He paused.

"I can hear _her_ calling out, you know," he added in a somewhat hollow voice. "I survived as myself, because the last time this happened, there was someone else that she was drawn to first. But now, there is no shield, beyond the cheap copies which will not stand. The First... I cannot see into his mind; it is like a steel ball, closed on itself, with empathy but very little sympathy. He can withstand her. And the Third is trapped within the loop of her own foreknowledge and past-sight. I have touched her mind, and it felt a little like _hers_. Perhaps the very similarity is some kind of defence. And the Fourth is no more... at least at the moment. We shall see."

Paxton Fettel licked his lips, looking around the room, at the precision and order of the organisation layered over the machine-like minds, following the directives he could see written across their selves, their training removing the inelegance from the dance of progress that he watched. He reached into the woman's soul, and snipped out the memories of what he had just said.

"_'Know what the stars forebode.'_" he breathed, letting her hair fall back into place. The operator bought up a new AR menu, and input a password, activating a concealed program as her own concealed internal programming kicked in.

The man let out a chuckle, as his form melted away into intangible ash which fell to the ground and vanished. Back inside the control suite, a faint smile crept onto his inanimate body.

It was time to do as AHNUNG had asked.

Exactly what they had _asked_.

~'/|\'~

The toppleless towers of Guh'thya-leh'yi, which had stood for many an age of the Earth, and had been foretold to stand for many more, crumbled and fell. Explosions ravaged the phosphorescent palaces of many terraces, and the gardens of strange leprous corals and grotesque brachiate efflorescences wilted and died, as the unseen machines of the modern era, and the noxious byproducts of war, filled their delicate fronded filter tubes and tore them apart, innocent victims of an uncaring legion of men and monsters.

It had been said that the Deep Ones could not be destroyed, and that it took the palaeogean magics of the Old Ones to keep them in check. Such tales were revealed for what they were; the hubris and self-aggrandisement of a species which had let its time slip through webbed fingers, and even now grasped spasmodically for that which had past and would not come again through their own devices, for all that they clutched at the memories and tales of the past. Even more than one hundred and sixty years ago, less than one Deep One generation ago (though many more of their bastard offspring and the lower race which they bred them from) the crude submersibles and low-yield depth charges of the ancient United States of America had hurt Y'ha-nthlei. They had not killed the city, true, merely wounded it and left it to recover and repair, to plan its revenge.

Y'ha-nthlei would not fall until 2079, when the revived Esoteric Order of Dagon drew the attention of the New Earth Government. There were still records from the First Innsmouth Campaign, after all, surviving the end of the United States and the First Arcanotech War to sit in archives, a weapon from the past to be drawn by modern humanity and thrust into the heart of their kin-species (for, until the advent of the Nazzadi, the Deep Ones had been the sapient species most akin to humanity). Nevertheless, now it was a blasted wreck; the fires and bombs and missiles of unified humanity descending from on high to lay wreckage to the place, the fleeing survivors tracked in the hope that they would lead the land-dwellers to more of the undersea cities.

They had not. And this was one of the main goals of the attack on Guh'thya-leh'yi; to take and hold the city intact. To take the secrets of the Deep Ones, take their knowledge and their tales and their maps and their plans. To steal from them that which defined them, and use it against them.

That was something that humanity did very well.

Azrael let out a screech, the harmonics shifted by the depths, travelling faster than it should have through the dark waters, and lashed out with a feeder tendril. The white armoured Deep One, spear cast aside in its attempts to flee, opened its mouth (the armour was not sealed, though the eyes were hidden behind the faceplate) and tried to bite into the tentacle.

**amusement** pulsed through the neural link, into Zuly's head. Azrael found this hilarious, she could feel, and she let out a faint giggle (quickly restrained) as a second tendril pulled the legs off the tiny figure before her, the cloud of rich red blood a slight discolouration on the thermals, rapidly dispersed as Azrael devoured the hapless fishman. He seemed calmer, now, the pulses of emotion reduced to mere whimsy by the time that they reached her, rather than the genuine terror which had been felt just before the attack... the nuclear attack.

"Good boy," she whispered softly, tightening her fingers around the control yokes. "Good boy. I'm sorry I didn't realise what you were doing."

**satisfaction** pulsed back at her, with just a hint of **boredom**.

Spinning on the spot, angled A-Pods thrusting her around, she raised one arm and let loose with the cutting laser, scoring deep scars into the architecture of Guh'thya-leh'yi, and scything down the foes which covered in it. Some of them were fighting back. The nuclear charges had shown that they could hurt the unfaithful. If only they had fired them earlier, before the rampaging armoured monsters had broken off. Others were merely hiding, until the heavier forces, their salvation, could get there.

They weren't coming.

There was a brief moment of quiet in the war, and Lieutenant Zuly used the opportunity to thrust into cover, the feet of her arcanocyberxenobiological organism anchoring itself into the rock. Quiet was a purely relative term, of course, as the deep thudding blasts of the bombardment from high above (far less than it should have been, reserves hurriedly moved into position to fill the losses) met the crack of superheated water from all over the city, and the corresponding retaliation from the Deep One forces. Looking up, Zuly saw a brief flare of light, followed by a ripple of explosions as the hit frigate tore itself apart. Unknown to her, a torpedo had got past the laser grid and torn through weakened armour, detonating the internal munitions supply, but the sight of the death of the NEGN ship was still sufficiently clear. The carcass of the slain ship, a dead leviathan, fell, spine barely holding, before slamming into an underwater spire, deep in this crevasse, where it broke up further. A few smaller explosions, remnants of the weapon systems blew then, only contributing further to the scattering of the remains of the _Truth and Justice_ across Guh'thya-leh'yi.

The war was going as well as might be hoped, given the catastrophe which had occurred at the start. The Engels had penetrated the outer city, which was even now under attack from the surviving capital units and the conventional submarines and mecha, and now they were in their favoured zone; the up-close, dangerous conflicts where their individual superiority over the larger Dagonite mecha and their older, pre-arcanotech war machines was best used. While the Ish were more of a support unit, their long-range torpedoes reaping a terrible cost in Leviathans and Hybras on the initial approach, the Hamshalliam _liked_ to get to the short-to-medium ranges in the dense conurbation that lay at the heart of the Deep One city, descending down into the crust where strange, arcane machinery was fuelled by the molten rock so close to the surface around Iceland.

"Check in." It was Captain Koru. He, at least, had made it down here intact, all the survivors of the squad pulling into the cavernous hall in the building they had just riddled with charge beam trails and carved with lasers. It looked like some kind of minor temple, perhaps, or the office of some kind of civil authority. It wasn't clear; the damage to the walls didn't really affect the fact that none of the squadron could read Ry'lehan, and so the hieroglyphs and associated pictures were nothing more than disturbing decorations (featuring too many tentacles and unnatural beings), to be erased. "Captain Koru, Engel-Type Hamshall, Designate Eremiel."

"First Lieutenant Border, Engel-Type Hamshall, Designate Sehkmet."

"Second Lieutenant Pecna, Engel-Type Hamshall, Designate Dyeus."

She checked in. "First Lieutenant Zuly, Engel-Type Hamshall, Designate Azrael." She said the last word with her characteristic disdain; she hadn't chosen the name, after all, even if this was a stupid time to be worrying about this.

There was a pause. Then Koru spoke, a note of melancholy in his tone. "The lights for Miguel and Sma are red. They're deemed MIA, until further confirmation."

_Already two losses, thought Zuly_. That really wasn't good. Engels didn't come with ejection systems, because of how the entry plug was built directly into the nervous system of the arcanocyberxenobiological organism, and this deep, if the plug was compromised, you'd be crushed, even in an HEV suit.

As if to remind her of that, she felt, rather than heard, the armoured chassis-carapace of Azrael creak, as a distant explosion let loose its pressure wave. You never really got used to that sound, even when you'd heard it many times. And, yes, she was safer than someone in a submarine, as the flesh of her Engel could probably hold out, even through an armour breach, but she was just in a small, fluid-filled plug, surrounded by armour and unnatural flesh. It was always a worry.

"Captain," said Samantha Border, nervousness evident even over the heavily encrypted comms, "I saw Cassiel get hit on the way down. He... he was right in front of me. Lieutenant Sma is dead, sir."

"It might have just been a mission kill," Su Koru said, gently.

"In that combat environment, that's as good as dead. Oh gods. It would have hit me, otherwise."

"Lieutenant Border, pull yourself together. You're having problems with your communion; I can read it. I do not need a berserk Engel, when we're in this situation."

There were several shuddery, fluid-filled breaths over the radio. "Sorry, sir. And sorry, Sehkmet. Calm down, girl, calm down. It's okay. I'm feeling better. I'll make it up to y..." there was a gurgled hiss of breath, "Sorry. Radio on."

No one said anything. There was a thud, felt through the chassis of the Engel, and through the feet anchored to the plazas of the city, and a brief lightness in the all consuming dark, far deeper than the sun would have reached, even had it been day.

"Do you think that was another nuke, Captain?" asked Pecna.

"No," he answered confidently, after a wait of about a second. "LAI says spectrum was wrong, and too deep, unless they want to blow up their city before we did it."

"I just wish we had proper underwater recon Engels," said Zuly, darkly. "Auphans were really useful, back when I was in a tin can. They could have told us what those fish-fuckers were going to do."

Samantha let out a gurgling chuckle. "We're up against the Deep Ones, here. They're the fish-fuckees, remem..." she said, interrupted by a torpedo smashing into the building, spilling rubble from the ceiling down onto her Engel. "Captain, I think they've found us," she added unnecessarily.

"Yes, I'd say so," Captain Koru said. "We've got new orders; they've got comms back up, and a proper Verdandi sensor frigate overhead. We're to head deeper into the city. Ignore the outer defences. They've detected what they think is the power source; if we can cripple their geothermal plants, they'll soften up."

"Deeper?" Zuly asked, scepticism in her voice.

**want**, emoted Azrael. **below. tasty. approval.**

"... and now Azrael _wants_ to go down there," she continued, the scepticism becoming concern. "As in, that was worryingly aware thought, just then. Are you sure that it's a good idea?"

"If we don't get the geothermal plants, the fleet will take heavy losses," the Captain said, ignoring her question. "Move out, bounding overwatch, two-by-two. Use NC4 LAI automated evasion package; it's too tight quarters for RZ4."

"Captain, 7... no, 8 Merrows coming in," said Pecna, worry in his voice, as he watched the sleek powered armour jet down to their hull-down position through a camera feed from an LAI-slaved drone. "Two squads. Highlighted and tagged on TacCom."

"Damn. Last thing I need, PA with CBs. Okay, prioritise targets. Ambush variant Delta-7. Don't let them get a shot off; those things are dangerous. Execute in 10. After that, we're going to want to keep away from buildings, because if they're deploying Merrows like that, they can wolf-pack us."

The eight pure-blooded Chosen, clad in the three-and-a-half metre tall armour which mounted an integral charge beam which punched way above their weight category, were exceptionally surprised when four Hamshalliam, each over ten metres tall, burst out through the wall of the second floor of the tomb of _Luh'ra-da-j'maen_, their whitish-green deepwater camo hard to see in the low light, designed as it was for low thermal emissions. They already had the targets located, and although the Merrow could punch above its weight, it was in all other regards a power armour, as the surprised pilots were well aware.

The surprise did not last long.

Well, apart from for the Deep Ones; in that case, it lasted for the rest of their lives.

~'/|\'~

The sun had already reached its zenith, after only a few short hours of light, before beginning its decent back under the horizon, the land returning to the night that embraced it so tightly in these winter months. Down below the surface, though, in the water filled sanctum where Dagon himself and the elite of the sorcerers of the Chosen, such things meant nothing, except in an astrological sense. And although the positions of the stars and the planets (or, more correctly, the effects on higher dimensional spaces that their c-limited propagating electromagnetic and gravitational waves, and other, more esoteric interactions, had) were of vital importance to such a ritual, the they were also known quantities. Stable. Controlled. Understood and accounted for.

_Jr-bs'sre hagb l'bh, DAGON-ybeq'uvt-urfg, bhe ce'nlref. Gnx'r bhg gur be-tbar sebz bhe f'bhyf naq gnxr vg hagb g'urr, gb jnxr gur ur-enyq, va freivpr gb CTHULHU-ybeq'fhcerzr_, the chant continued. Over and over again. _Jr-bs'sre hagb l'bh, DAGON-ybeq'uvt-urfg, bhe ce'nlref. Gnx'r bhg gur be-tbar sebz bhe f'bhyf naq gnxr vg hagb g'urr, gb jnxr gur ur-enyq, va freivpr gb CTHULHU-ybeq'fhcerzr._

Lord Dagon let out an ululating gurgle, and send another surge of ruach downwards, down to the Earth's core. It was necessary to rouse the _Ancient-One-Who-Slept-In-Fire_ slowly, to ensure that it was full and woken as close as possible to _gurpr-y'rf'gv'ny p'bawhap-g'v-ba_, the celestial conjunction that was coming so soon. It would ensure that the great being, ancient beyond belief, would listen to his petition, and acknowledge his right to do so.

To rouse it too quickly could be disastrous. It slept by the core of the Earth, after all.

Compared to a human, the visual range of the Deep Ones was spread over a larger range of frequencies, yet had anomalous gaps. It was not surprising, after all. Evolution selects for traits which aid survival and increase the chance of breeding in the environment which the species dwells. In the case of _Homo sapiens sapiens_, then, the arboreal-roots of the apes from which they had come was clearly evident, all the way from their dexterous manipulators to their superior colour vision for a mammalian species. Mammals, descended as they were from nocturnal creatures, tended to trade colour vision, with its inefficient cone cells, for the always-functional, black and white rod cells. The arboreal branch of the warm-blooded lactating creatures that contained the primates (and within them, the great apes), therefore, had been forced, by circumstance (and the need to find brightly coloured food in a largely green environment), to re-evolve colour vision, and indeed their ability to distinguish between different wavelengths of light was excellent by mammalian species, while retaining, compared to much of the animal kingdom, superlative night vision. The cost they had paid was still evident, however; they were trichromates, rather than tetrachromates, unlike the rest of the animal kingdom. And the Nazzadi, _Homo sapiens nazzadi_ were a kin sub-species, engineered by the alien Migou, based off archaic _Homo sapiens sapiens_, and one of the things that the Yuggothian fungoids had done was rebuild the structure of the eye, so that it conformed to their aesthetic preferences. It was more efficiently designed, wired the right way around, and gave them night vision comparable to that of most mammals, with only a slight loss in the acuity of their colour vision (hence the slightly over-bright, and discordant colours, when seen from a human viewpoint, common in Nazzadi fashion).

The Deep Ones, the _Dagon-tra'rg-v'pf_, had been subjected to rather different pressures. Down in the depths, clinging, ape-like, to reefs (and what was their relationship to man, exactly? They bore live young, that was certain, and maintained thermal equilibrium in their body temperature, albeit a lower one than most mammals, but they had gills; an adaptation which even the cetaceans had not evolved), the ability to see all the colours that a human could was a lot less useful than the ability to see through the water of their aquatic biome. They were only dichromates; able to see the blue-green that was absorbed by water the least, and infrared, used for point-blank hunting. They could see the polarisation of light, though, and their low-light vision was superior to that Homo sapiens sapiens, though notably inferior to that of the engineered Nazzadi. If the qualia that one of the Chosen experienced could be converted into that seen by a human mind (and it could, due to parapsychics and their ability to intrude into the mind of another), then they would seem as blind to yellow as humanity was to infrared, and pure green hovered at the edge of perception, in the same fashion as a blacklight; the blue-green (to a human) wavelengths the centre of their perception. To a Deep One, the surface was a strange, dark place; the blue sky containing a blue-green/infrared sun, shining over the largely black expanses of nature and of the buildings that the humans constructed. In return, the infra-red and the polarisation of light was opened up to them. A human being was blind to both_ evtug-eb'gng'r _and_ y'rsg-eb'gng'r_, let alone the difference between them. Though they were kin, compared to the other _things_ in the Aeon War, the gap in perceptions was massive. And bridged by every hybrid who transformed, yellows fading to nothingness as a whole new qualian spectrum opened up.

And so, when Lord Dagon's sight faded, the area around him forcing it into colours and qualia _that he should not have been able to see_, losing all the infrared components, and forcing him into the perceptions of a hostile mind, he knew to be afraid. It was in fact more alarming than the way that the Deep One sorcerers who surrounded him faded to ash, falling apart, for it was possible for that to happen naturally, whether through sorcerous backlash or hostile powers. But this change in the way he perceived things; the only way that could happen was if something was inside his mind.

"You were open, like a castle with its door unbarred and its gates spread wide," said a hollow sounding voice, from within his mind. And he understood it, understand the alien thought processes that raped his mind with the bloodied hooks they ploughed through his subconscious mind.

_**fire**_

_**bodies**_

_**awakening**_

"You reached out, looking for another mind. But, like the hedgehog who tried to get close to another, you were impaled."

Dagon searched around, in this red-tinted world he was trapped in, alone in a hollow sphere filled with water. Even the walls, so carefully inscribed with the runes in vibrant _q'r r-cerq'_, were now blank.

There were two figures standing on the curved ceiling above him, the taller one stood in front of the smaller one... no, there was only one figure. Who took a step forwards, a casual stroll as if he was in his native environment. In a sense he was; this was not the physical body of the human, he could see. The lord of the Deep Ones tried to communicate, try to work out what was going on.

_What are you?_

The man smiled, hair perfectly still, as if it were sculpted onto his head. "Can't you see? Why don't you think?"

_Exist Spawn-of-Yog-Sothoth_

Paxton Fettel shook his head. "No."

_Exist Spawn-of-Yog-Sothoth!_

"Use your mind. Call upon your memories."

A pause. Then;

_Impossible! Can not be!_

"No. No. Not impossible at all. You? You are one of the chosen servants of a dead god who sleeps. And I?" The corners of his mouth turned up. "I am not a _servant_. Nor was I _chosen_." Paxton Fettel paused for a second. "At least, not by _her_. Others removed that right from _her_."

_**fire**_

_**bodies**_

_**death**_

_untranslatable?_

"Think more. Open up your mind."

_Exists refusal, mindworm!_

The man grinned, a predator's smile. "I wondered how long it would take you to realise. But it really doesn't matter. I have touched your mind, now, and now they know how you _feel_. That is enough."

_How is this thing possible?_

There was a new stress in the alien mind. It reached out, but found that it now longer controlled its body, that its mind was trapped in a fleshy prison. Paxton Fettel continued walking, another step along the ceiling. He was getting very close to the bloated Deep One, now, the glint of steel in his hand evident.

"The light of your soul shone out, as you tried to contact Moloch. Through your wards, through your shields, through time and space. And the light is still out there."

_**fire**_

_**bodies**_

_**death**_

_Does not exist! Is not wanted! _

"I am in your mind, not your soul. What use is a soul, Lord Dagon, if you have no mind to think with?" He coughed slightly. "I am afraid that they only want you for your soul, for your AT-Field. They really don't care about your body or mind at all."

_I will destroy you!_

"Yes. Given time."

_Time is on my side!_

"No." There was a grim finality to the words. "No. It is not. The Third. The White Dollmaker. She comes for you. And you cannot even gain the will to move, let alone let the light of your soul shield you from what she bears."

_**fire**_

_**bodies**_

_**death**_

_Impossible_

"You keep on using that word. I am not entirely sure that you know what it means." The man shrugged. "It does not matter. You deserve to die." He paused. "You know why I kept talking to you?" he asked, in a casual tone. "With each word, each thought, I get deeper into your mind. I bind it to me. I steal it. How much of the thing answering me is you, oh mighty Dagon," the sarcasm was blatant in that statement, "and how much of that thing is a simulation being run in my own mind, to trick your soul into remaining where it is while the Third comes even closer?"

_What is it that you want!_

The man paused. "Retaliation," he answered finally.

_**fire**_

_**bodies**_

_**death**_

And then death came through the ceiling. It was not the kind of beam so beloved of fiction, which gives a point of immanent brightness which expanded into a terrible light which permit the victim a futile attempt to flee. No, it was death incarnate, a sudden transition from life to non-life which left the entire room nothing but plasma. In a sense, it was almost anti-climatic in its suddenness.

But the universe did not care for dramatic necessity, and merely progressed according to its (albeit mutable) laws.

The three Evangelions stood on the mountainside, and watched the fungoid cloud blossom above what had been the mine, braced as the shockwave rippled the ground beneath them and slammed into their profiles. The blast was tainted with strange colours, greens and purples and blues, as the orgone reservoirs which the ritual had built up discharged, transmuted into photons throughout the spectrum, and other, strange forms of matter, which too quickly decayed.

"Target eliminated," said Rei, dispassionately. "The ritual site has been cleared."

It took almost thirty seconds for Misato to respond, her image cracked and distorted as a fresh E-9 was moved into position. "Uh... wow," she managed. "Request confirmation of target's destruction," the Major added.

"Target eliminated," repeated Rei. "The ritual site has been cleared."

"We're not getting any Pattern Blues from the site," called out Aoba, from his desk. "The Arr-Eees are clear, too."

"Good," said Asuka. "Now, can we detach the umbilical, and move out, now that the First has done her thing. She doesn't need the power, now, and I'm running off batteries here."

"Why are they called umbilicals, anyway?" asked Shinji, frowning. "They go into the back. That's... not where an umbilical cord goes."

"Because they're a plug that goes into the torso?" hazarded Misato.

"Yes, but that's a rather ornate name, isn't it? I'd thought that they'd have called it something like the Arcanoelectric Transferred Power Conduit, or at the very least translated it into German or something." He sucked on his top lip as he thought. "Like... _Magenkabel_," he hazarded.

A window opened fro,Unit 02. "Shinji." The red-haired girl's face was almost as flat as Rei's.

"Yes, Asuka?"

"Shut up. Stop babbling. Learn more German. 'Stomach cable' isn't a good name. And Rei. Give me back my main engine."

Agent Tome, of Special Services, tapped Misato on the shoulder. "They should do that. The _Solomon Throne_ is moving up, and it can't land if there are hostile forces."

"That's approved," said Misato. "Shinji, Asuka, Rei. Keep the area clear of Dagonite forces; we've got more aircraft moving up, once the atmosphere clears up.

The pale girl nodded. "I shall do so", she said. "I think... no, it does not matter," she corrected herself.

"Okay..." said Asuka, squinting at the other girl.

"No," said Shinji. "Really, what was it? Was it important? Do you... know that something is happening?" he asked, unsure of how to direct questions at the parapsychic.

"I know everything is happening," Rei answered. "If it does not happen, it does not exist. That is how we define everything."

"Uh..." Shinji tailed off. "Never mind." He closed the window, leaving Rei gazing out of her fluid-flooded capsule, the walls covered in overlays and projections, a few commands enough to detach the umbilical cables that had provided the extra power for the charge beam, running it off the equivalent of three frigate-grade power grids.

And she knew what had happened.

_brother_

_sister_

_**fire**_

_**bodies**_

_**awakening**_

~'/|\'~

Time passed.

Replica Unit Foxtrot 813 opened his eyes. Before them lay patterns of blue and green and red, cascading before his eyes in random patterns of squares and hexagons, reforming and melting away with each beat of his heart. His arms and legs felt restricted, and there was some force, pulling him to his right, squeezing him against the wall. Squirming, he managed to move his left arm; the right was being crushed, right up against something.

_Status: I still remain in my REV-8_, he thought. _The patterns match the response of the internal eyesguard to a strong magnetic field. The external armour appears to have taken major damage, although I remain physically intact._

Squirming from within the immobilised suit, he managed to free his left arm from the suit's arm, bringing it into the pilot's capsule. The REV-8's limb screeched, as melted servos tried to match the movement, before giving up when the Replica remembered to disconnect the feedback system. The right one remained pinned against the arm of the suit, only able to move it a small distance before some force pulled it back.

If 813 had been built from pure baseline genetic material, his arm would have almost certainly have been broken. Even as it was, it felt heavily bruised.

"Foxtrot 813 calling all Units in the area. Phi-alpha, phi-alpha. 813 calling all units."

There was no response; only intense random static in the systems.

With the one free hand, he groped at his helmet, pulling away the piloting overlay, which was malfunctioning and producing the colours. The inside of the suit was cast in the same red, green and blue light, though, as the mainscreen of the armour exhibited the same problems. Through the corrupted interface, he could vaguely see the shapes of where warning were meant to be, their boxes unreadable under the flickering light. Finally getting his hand to the release leaver, he pulled it, the sound of pressure seals venting a welcome noise to the Replica.

The front failed to open. He gave it a thump, trying to dislodge it. Nothing happened. The push also failed to provide any help at all.

813 paused for a moment, giving it what-passed-for-thought in his pseudo-sapient mind. From what he could tell, there was an issue with the right arm, probably with the plasma cannon mounted on it, which relied on a linear spatially discontinuous arcanomagentic field to channel and prevent dissipation of the plasma. That would fulfil the observed details.

Satisfied, he began the shutdown procedure for the D-Engine mounted in the back of the REV-8. He considered initialising the Horizon Event emergency shutdown; the idea was rejected, because if it turned out that the REV-8 could be salvaged when he inspected it from the outside, the D-Engine would have to be replaced, making the armour useless for this mission.

This time, when he levered open the front-opening slides with the freed arm, they opened. The arcanomagentic field was still present, due to the D-Cells in the plasma cannon specifically designed to keep the field active in the case of a shutdown, if the weapon was still hot, but weakened, in dissipation mode, and so he could pull the arm away, standing up from the ruins of the building he had been thrown into by the blast.

All around, was urban wastes, in the most literal sense. The dust filled the air, mixed with nanological and micrological agents, turning the weak winter sun, this far north, red, like the sun was setting early. Tangled power cables, formerly strung between the busy apartment complexes which had filled this residential district, lay on the ground like the corpses of snakes, their power cut. The area was unpleasantly hot; the trap which had destroyed an entire district may have melted into the round, the surface of the earth no contest for the heat it produced, but the radiated heat and the warming of the ground, still made things this close to the area like a desert. It was why it was quieter here; troops not in power armour couldn't operate here properly, the only survivors bunkering down in buildings, and so the NEG could claim armoured supremacy without much difficulty, leaving only the handicapped infantry to fight against superior forces.

A flight of five Chalybion gunships swept the skies, surrounded by optically-camouflaged, car-sized scout drones. They didn't use true stealth systems, to keep down the cost and weight, but the LAI scouts, slaved to the Chalybions, were still very hard to see, even as they fed comprehensive sensor profiles of the area to their parent gunships. There were the explosive impacts of charge beams, and the crack of superheated air from rapid-fire lasers, as they swept over the ruins, search-lights cutting through the dimness and often scaring the surviving Dagonite militia enough that they would break from cover, exposing themselves to the gunships.

One of the slaved drones detected a density profile below, which, compared to the local magnetic field strength and the sharp spike in it, was characteristic of a damaged powered armour unit; specifically, one where a weapon which required an arcanomagentic field for containment was damaged. It fed the data to the smarter LAI installed in the Chalybion, which processed it further. The data was... confusing to the Chalybion LAI. The model was none of the standard ones, neither New Earth Government nor Esoteric Order of Dagon, and it began an archival search to see if it was an obsolete, or jury-rigged civilian model, while another process noted that it was in such a situation that any IFF-signal it might have been emitting would have been corrupted beyond readability, while several more processes ran through its heuristic guidelines, accumulated over the course of the active field use of the Chalybion, for situations unanticipated by the original designers.. After 'pondering' this for a little under two seconds, it reported a cut down version of the data to its pilot, and transferred copies to its 'sibling' LAIs, in the other craft in the flight.

The report consisted of adding an"unknown" marker tag in yellow to the map, on the location of the what-it-guessed-to-be damaged power armour.

"We've got a unknown on the targeting computer," said the co-pilot, gazing at the vast projected screen on the inside of the windowless cockpit. "Reads as some kind of damaged PA, no IFF, Eminar-status on the armour. Shoot / no shoot?"

The pilot paused for a moment, as he approved an LAI request for control over the nose-laser, the crack of laser fire scoring its way along a building and cutting apart an abandoned AA railgun position. "No-shoot," he said, finally. "There are SpecOps in the area, and they don't always use IFF or reggies. Avoid blue-on-blue. "

"Understood. Recorded location for other forces, moving on."

The flight of Chalybions, LAI piloting systems producing a pseudo-random walk to cover the area in a non-predictable fashion, continued onwards, bringing death and destruction with them from the skies.

Foxtrot 813 watched them go, a pale imitation of what would have been anger in a human flashing briefly through his mind, before the foreign feeling passed. His situation was clear. He was separated from the rest of his squad and from all his allies, his power armour was crippled (the legs were crushed under a beam, he could see), and the Esoteric Order of Dagon were still present in force.

He would just have to go complete his mission on his own. At least until he got another instruction to the contrary from due authority.

Reaching down into the opened cockpit of his now-ruined REV-8, he retrieved the out-of-armour case which all Replica units in vehicles were issued. A true combat helmet, the wideband optical sensor went over the padded sealed unit worn while in a vehicle, the connectors snapping into place and locking it to the internal armour bracing. After retreating from the wreckage with the case, he rebooted his visual software, the re-emergence of the HUD a welcome feel to the Replica soldier. The quick-snap pouches were attached to their designated places. And, importantly, the standard issue weapon for the Replicas, the ECU-IMFW-3 (or, as anyone who actually had to deal with it called it, the Imphaw), was prepared, removed from the sealed bag.

With the development of the Type-V Eidelon Units, it had been felt that they needed a weapon which took advantage of their unique assets over conventional troops. The first step at this had merely bulked out the old HKS-189, increasing the clip size and removing the fire-rate limiter that the weapon possessed (due to the limited ability of a human to absorb the recoil). It had been the IMFW-1, designed for the Type-VIs, which had really taken advantage of their increased strength, by basing the system around the old MP-50 Repeating Cannon, a 20mm anti-armour railgun designed to be mounted upon light hovercraft. It was a partial solution to the total inferiority of foot infantry to powered armour, which left them relying on missile launchers and their own armoured units to have any hope of scratching them.

The ECU-IMFW-3 was an evolution of that decision. The core of the weapon was built around a railgun, firing the same 20mm hypervelocity solid slugs as used in the RMG-10-AM anti-armour rifle; eight to a magazine. Mounted underneath was a 9mm assault rifle, relying on old-fashioned electrochemical ignition, due to the issues with magnetic induction in the other rail, in a weapon too small to use arcanomagnetic fields. It could take out powered armour through the front facing, and cause mission kills on heavier mecha, if hit in weak spots.

It was, all in all, an excellent weapon, albeit a stopgap until the man-portable energy weapons (the first prototypes already being trialled on this deployment, although they still had large problems with capacity and weight) could enter widespread use. And, indeed, it had seen use outside of the products of Project Eidelon; both the Office of Special Services and Blackspire, the GIA black-ops agency, issued it to some of their field agents. The only problem with it, from the point of view of the NEG military as a whole, was that it weighed almost ten kilograms when fully loaded, and still could break the shoulder of the firer if they were improperly braced when firing the railgun. It was, in fact, just too heavy and too powerful to be used as a rifle by conventional soldiers.

It had been built from the ground up with the needs of the Replica programme in mind, after all.

Foxtrot 813 ducked into cover, as he felt, rather than saw, the missile streak down, wobbling slightly, and hit the building across the street. Pulling himself up, he wiped the dust from the sensors on the front of his visor, and knelt, scanning the street. His equipment was not receiving an update signal from local forces or an overhead E-9, and the compass in his helmet was pointing directly away from the wreckage of his armour, no matter where he stood, which provided no help at all. Vocally, then, he instructed his helmet's LAI (much, more more limited than the advanced systems, capable of heuristics and complex analysis, installed in the Chalybions), to alter the order of his objectives. It was necessary to reunite with NEG forces first, before he could complete his objectives.

Keeping low, in the dense cover of the ruins of _Dagon'uvtu Oraribyrapr_, the Replica headed out.

And, passing by, something noticed him. Something which currently lay outside what humanity called reality.

~'/|\'~

The underwater grotto was quite beyond comprehension, the majesty of the place unfitting of the small, petty-sounding word. Roughly hemispherical, the curved surface hanging down from a flattened roof, the place was hewn from the rough basalt of the volcanic rock. To counteract the darkness that such a material would produce, though, the incredible volume had been decorated to a level almost unbelievable, even to modern human society and its nanofactories. Fresco-like paintings, adapted for such underwater environments, covered every surface of this place, the detail truly incredible (though somewhat lost on a species which could not see the infrared). Temples and spiralling towers hung down from the ceiling, joined by plants, unknown to the surface world,which instead of consuming the light of the sun with photosynthesis, radiated it out at an incredible intensity through the blessing of those who had planted them. Even with this light, the depths of the immense cavern remained shadowed.

All this, however, paled before the statue that stood in the centre of the flooded chamber, a colossus with tower-like legs astride a vast deformation in the rock, a carven body of a fallen titan. The figure must have been almost a kilometre tall, almost reaching the ceiling despite the impossible dimensions of this hidden carven, the holy of holies beneath the city of Guh'thya-leh'yi. It was quite unlike the basalt of the cavern, for it was made (for "carven" would imply a crudity anathema to this abominable masterwork) from a strange, blackish-green rock, striated and flecked with gold and iridescent shimmers that sparkled in the bluish-green light that glowed from the depths, the floor itself shining. If one were to blaspheme it by touching it, a deed that should surely lead to death, the impossible smoothness would have been felt, like warm, wet ice; disconcertingly alive.

And to speak of this subject... well. Human languages trod with care in such a domain, for the limited experiences of such an organic linguistic system were not well suited for the nigh-infinite vicissitudes of the cosmos beyond this planet. The figure was vaguely anthropic; that was the best that could be said for it. Comparisons would involve hominids, cephalopods , and even the draconic, but it was most certainly its own thing; one cohesive lifeform far beyond the ken of mortal man. Two vast wings, impossibly thin and membranous for such a massive construct, made from the same unknown stone, spread wide across the inverted dome, exulting in the freedom that they enjoyed. Unspeakable tentacles descended from the maw of the thing, large enough to grab a frigate and consume it in the alien, jawless mouth that adorned the abomination. Claws and scale and hooked tentacles adorned the beast, but far more terrifying than any mere blade, though it may be the size of the building, was the look of intellect in the statue, which seemed to gaze out through graven eyes, something that was obviously constructed, yet in some subtle, unknowable way, alive.

And it was before this statue that Yul'uth-ca, star-spawn and highest priest among the clergy of doomed Guh'thya-leh'yi, prostrated himself.

It was all going wrong. The planet had not even rotated upon its axis one half of a cycle since the attack had, in retrospect, begun.

And he could hear them. All of them. Calling, calling, in the depths... longing? Was that the right emotion? Or was it fear? Hunger? Nostalgia? He did not know, and it filled his soul with a cerebral terror. And those were not the only songs he could hear. A triumvirate of noise which filled his heart with both faith and dread; fear and reverence, blasted mindlessly onto the astral plane. Yul'uth-ca had existed for time almost beyond counting; so many orbits of this planet that he could not remember them all, and such volume was heard infrequently, and only as a declaration of war.

But there was the other voice, two lesser ones highlighting certain themes and frequencies, while ignoring others, and amplifying the greater one merely by its presence. A soft hum accompanied it that left his tendrils twitching and itching, almost negligible in the mental noise that degraded his wits so. That... that was the one that consumed his mind with dread, so that he could not even focus on the most trivial sorceries. It was not a voice (or, at least, the synaesthetic representation of a fifth dimensional astral waveform intruding into the lower dimensions) that he had heard before, true. But he could feel the desires, alien ones bleeding off a mind not like his own. And that mind knew what it wanted, and how to get it.

Yul'uth-ca realised that he had made up his mind. Swinging wide the diamond doors that led into the corpse-thing that lay at the feet of his God, he descended into the vaults.

It was time, once more, to retrieve Лu-hvean'tahæn, the weapon passed down to him from when they had descended to this world, to war the long-dead Things-Of-Five and their artificial Unshaped-But-What-They-Chose weapons of war.

No upstart race would stand against that. The Deep Ones, petty servants who had the luck that one of their number had been uplifted by the Lord himself, might fall against their kin-species; another race from this ball of rock, who would be forgotten just as the Ushashasshu and the Lae'luouiu'lu (to name but two of the flights towards sapience, which had been bought to a halt. True sapience, that is, not the pitiful lack of awareness which both the humans and the Deep Ones had,) had been, buried under aeons of time.

The Star Spawn would not.

~'/|\'~

"The Third Star unit has secured the area. I repeat, Third Star has cleared area. Deploy Solomon; authorisation code Aleph-93-00-61-93-Kaph-Resh-92-53-19-49..." The officer continued to rattle off the lengthy authorisation code.

"Control, this is Solomon Throne. We have received a valid authorisation code for the deployment of Solomon. We require a secondary authorisation, to acknowledge that Operation Goetia can proceed."

The albino stared at the screen, marked **[VOICE ONLY]**; a legacy of the fact that the bandwidth used had been necessarily minimised. Idly, he rubbed one ear, while working his jaw.

"Solomon Throne, this is Goetia Control. Secondary authorisation will be given to proceed. Valid ID: Agent Tome. Authorisation code is as follows; Pe-75-Aleph-Mem-Mem-02-06-33-76-Resh-He..." A second, equally lengthy code was given.

"Control, this is Solomon Throne. Authorisation received. Operation Goetia will commence."

The plae skinned man nodded, a slight smile (not of pleasure, but instead of satisfaction) creeping onto his face, like one from the prospect of seeing something long awaited coming to fruition. "You will be using Variant Null, proceeding to higher Variants as needed by circumstances."

"Correct, Control." There was a pause. "I require reaffirmation for the authorisation for the potential use of τitan."

Agent Tome nodded, even though the field agent couldn't see him.

"Correct. Note that the use of τitan is only permitted in the case of the situation progressing to Variant Five. Be aware that, as stands, you are closer than minimum safe distance, and lack the ability to survive the use of τitan. Also, be aware of the consequences of any use of τitan which is not later contained, which include massive ecological damage, estimated to be over an order of magnitude worse than any other RV-WALCL variants. Authorisation for use of asset in Variant Five contingency is as follows..."

~'/|\'~

Shinji jumped slightly in his seat in the entry plug, as a large shape suddenly appeared above him on his long range sensors, the systems chiming in warning.

"What is that!" he blurted out. "Uh... I've got a big thing, about 100 metres long, right above us," he added, as he swung the plasma minigun upwards, staring up for visual contact.

"I can't see it! Nothing's pinging for me... just a hint. I just got a hit," said Asuka, her face flushed. "It's big... uh... yes, there it is again." The Evangelions scattered, crushing melted terrain underfoot as they prepared for a threat that one of them was blinded to, and one could only see hints of.

"The LAI doesn't recognise it as friendly," Shinji said. "Should we attack?"

"Don't attack," shouted Agent Tome, shoving Misato out of the way of the control console in his frantic motion. The military officer reflexively shoved back, training taking over, sending the rather scrawny albino sorcerer sprawling to the ground. "Don't shoot," he shouted from the ground, panting. "It's the _Solomon Throne_."

Misato winced. "Sorry," she said. "Now, explain. What's happening? And you could tell us that you have control of a..." she paused. "... a what looks to be a frigate, before you try to land it in the place with 3 Units with capital grade firepower, maybe?"

"Why doesn't it show up on IFF?" asked Shinji, somewhat more relaxed.

"Why haven't you got Dr Akagi to write a patch for my sensors?" added Asuka, in a rather more aggrieved tone.

"Asuka, she says it's a hardware problem, that they've got damaged, and for some reason the equipment doesn't realise that it's damaged, so it makes it looks like a software problem." Misato glanced over at Makota, who gave her a thumbs up. "Yes, that's right. And as for why it doesn't have those _safety things_ that we military folk have to _stop friendly fire_," she said, glaring at the Special Services sorcerer, who was currently engaged in wiping the dust from his black overcoat, "well. Agent Tome. Why not explain why you don't have those things that stop people shooting you?"

The sorcerer sighed. "The _Solomon Throne_ isn't a standard model, like the rest of its type. They're based off the old Type-11-V Light Picket Ships, but they've been heavily modified for in-atmosphere use."

"I thought so!" said Makota, a spark in his eye. "The profile looks like an interwar spacecraft, rather than a modern ship!"

"Exactly. We needed something with spaceship-grade stealth capacities, for some of the... tasks we must perform. In-atmosphere stealth systems have to dump the heat periodically, or they'd fry. Void-grade stealth systems use waste heat to run a D-Engine in reverse to get rid of what they can... thermodynamics is still a bitch, but the efficiency is much higher." He glanced at Misato, an offended look in his eyes. "I think you can see why we don't have the data added to IFF systems, maybe?"

"I'm sorry for pushing you," sighed Misato, in a somewhat patronising tone. "It was reflexive." She paused. "So, what now?"

"Uh... the Solomon Throne will land. It will take about an hour to prepare the area; we need to laser-carve in the proper wardings, and seed the area with the nanocleansers. After that... the ritual should take about seven hours, depending on how advanced the Order got with their own ritual. We'll be a lot faster than them, after all. We're not trying to wake it up slowly, after all, feeding it with ruach... that is, orgone to boost its strength. We're trying to wake it up as violently as possible, so that it's weak."

~'/|\'~

"Is this everyone who could get to the rally point?" asked Captain Kora "_Really_? Everyone?"

"No," answered the _amlati_ Lieutenant, one of the three survivors from his squadron, "but we're the only ones who made it this deep. There's more comms chatter up above, but down here, they've got some kind of sorcery up."

The high powered lights mounted on the Engels lit up the corridors, displaying the blasphemous, unnatural pictures that covered the walls, pictures within pictures, hieroglyphs within cuneiform within letters. Against this mismatch of colours, the constructs of the New Earth Government were hideously obvious, their deep-water, chemically camouflaged greenish-white paint blatant against the decadence that surrounded them on all sides. Now, there were only eleven Engels; nine Hamshalliam and two Ish, and both the Ish were out of the long-range torpedoes which were their primary armaments, reduced to a single large laser cannon, and their natural armaments. They were actually exceptionally dangerous in these close confines; their long, sinous, eel-like shape as well as their superior LAI systems giving them a real advantage over the humanoid Hamshalliam, but if they were to have to go back to open waters now, they'd be little better than hit-and-run attackers and the closest thing that the amphibious Engels got to scouts.

A mish-mash of squadrons were the ones who had made it down to the depths of the Dagonite city, right down to the bottom of the rift, where the orders had said that the geothemal plants were located. And they had gone deeper, and taken even more casualties, and fought their way down, through this confusing labyrinth (which, admittedly, had been made somewhat easier to pass through the judicious application of firepower). All of Captain Koru's squadron, those who had made it down, were still here, and they'd been joined by the remnants of other squadrons; three from one group tasked with hitting a laser site, an Ish-Hamshall pair they'd found, even deeper with than them, their main objective crushed by a sunken frigate, the sole survivor of a squadron who'd been too close to the blasts, and another lone Ish, who'd been engaged in a fight against a thirty metre long shark.

"Ready to breach?" asked Zuly, levelling her charge beam at the point her targeting LAI highlighted, hyperedged blade (not an integral one, an auxiliary one issued in cases where extreme close range fighting was expected) in other hand.

"Ready."

"Ready."

The underwater thwumpth of the firing of charge beams, into the spots that had already been weakened by strategically placed laser fire, echoed through the structure of this place, and through the water, making the hulls of the arcanocyberxenobiological organisms creak under the immense pressure. Braced onto the walls, the Engels weathered the pressure wave from the flash-ionised water around the blasts, temperature gaugues rising precipitously before falling again.

Really, it was very fortunate that this labyrinth had been built to this scale. The Engels could actually fit; it would have been less of an issue for the Ish, as their narrow cross-section was fully advantageous here, but the Hamshalliam were just short enough to move down these corridors, well over ten metres high.

"Bloody hell," whispered one of the Ish pilots, one of the survivors from a mixed formation. "Streaming image."

There certainly wasn't a geothermal plant down there... at least, not immediately down there. For there to be a geothermal plant, there would have had to be geology, and there was only a vast, space, almost a kilometres high, from what they could see in the light that was there. And it was populated, too, or at least decorated; they were emerging from buildings, hanging down from the roof, and there was some kind of vast statue which reached all the way to the ceiling, towards the centre of the hemisphere. The immensity of the thing, so vast, made it almost unreadable, the details lost in the titanic size of the architecture.

From what they could discern, it was for the best that they could not grasp the full being, only able to concentrate on small details.

"I wish... I just wish I had torpedoes left," the same pilot muttered. "This is the kind of place I could make a killing, hull down up here."

"But you don't," said Captain Koru, curtly. He paused for a moment, his intake of breath audible over the radio. "The Ish, hold this position. This is our only way

"Sir," asked Samantha, cautiously. "Did you have any idea that this place was here? It's... wow."

"It's dangerous, Lieutenant Border," the Captain answered. "This is hostile territory, right in the middle of enemy territory, and it was hidden. And, no, I didn't know that they'd built some kind of..." words failed him, for a moment, "some kind of giant black hemisphere underground. I mean, how are they even keeping the city upright. This thing means that they've got no foundations."

**liar** emoted Azrael, simply. **liar. calling, calling. depths. longing.**

obvious..

_shush_ emoted Zuly. _danger. keep me/us safe, kill my/our enemies._

**eat?**

Inside the plug, Zuly made a nauseated face. Not just at the beast underneath and around her, its nervous system pulsing through her brain. No, the disgust was at _how good_ the Engels... emotion? Thought? Desire? It wasn't quite clear... made it feel and sound. Everything had felt so much more... real, this mission, in Azrael. And he was feeling much, much smarter. His emotions were becoming more akin to thoughts.

She was still in control, yes. But how much of it was her control, and how much his influence bled through into her control, was becoming worryingly uncertain to the Nazzadi woman. She retuned her attention. The instructions were clear. The Ish, emptied of torpedoes and thus underarmed compared to the charge beams of the Hashmalliam, were to hold the exit in the ceiling of this place, while the other Engels explored, sticking together. She sheathed the hypededged blade on the storage rack fitted to her back; she'd want full aiming with both arm-mounted guns for this.

"And... go!"

The nine Hamshalliam dropped down from the hole that they'd blow in the ceiling, gliding through the water in a delta formation, their greenish-white armour much more camouflaged in the lighting that made up this place. The beasts inside relaxed somewhat, vents opening up and their feeder tendrils darting out, tasting the water for any strangeness, their long, guard tentacle-like tail extruding fully, lashing from side to side to aid the A-Pods. From above, the light from the biolumiscent plants shone brightly, the greenish light making the pale figures seem almost white.

"What's that?" asked the _amlati_ lieutenant from earlier; Zuly thought his name was Tera. "Look, down there!"

She zoomed in, amplifying the display, while her Engel circled. Her eyes widened in recognition, as something she'd only seen in training kicked in.

"Holy shit," said Pecna,voice strangled. "Star-Spawn! We've got a genuine, Grade 7 Knight-Type down there!"

"Everyone, flock-and-lock!" ordered the Captain, already pulling his Engel down to the bowl-like surface of the inverted hemisphere. "Kill that thing fast, before it can do anything."

'Flock-and-lock' was a simple command, and the most common one when faced with exceedingly dangerous entities such as a Knight-Type, especially one as high as Grade 7. For amphibious Engels, such as the Hamshalliam, it meant to try to surround it, spread out (as to minimise who much damage it could do at once) get to the nearest surface, and activate the clamps, which stabilised the ACXB against the recoil from the charge beam.

The Star Spawn, tentacled maw twitching just gazed up at them. It was clad in some kind of armour, unusually; some kind of hybrid between plates of armour, and robes. And the robes were a concern, because who knew what might be concealed underneath. The loose garments wafted in the currents, as the Engels slammed down into the painted floor, smashing it underfoot as, at the last moment, their A-Pods flipped, inverting the direction of thrust. Knees bent as they absorbed the impact, manipulators extruding from the legs to become true feet, not just the hydrodynamic variant they were when swimming. Breaths shallow, Lieutenant Zuly could _feel_ as Azrael's tail mostly retracted into his body, leaving only enough for combat uses, rather than swimming.

She straightened up, drawing the hyperedged blade from her back, and Azrael leered as she raised their head, blinded eyes, replaced by implanted sensors which hijacked the nerves, still gazing at their opponent.

There was one moment of perfect, eternal silence, as the nine Engels surrounded the one lone figure in the centre, particle beams levelled at their foe, blades in the other hand. It was unarmed, apparently. But it was still a Grade 7, still a Knight, and they certainly weren't going to take any risks.

They waited just a moment too long.

Fast, far too fast, the hostile beat those massive wings, thrusting it forwards in a way only aided by its swimming-tail. The sonic boom of displaced water filled the air, as it slammed into Sekhmet, both hands held together in a fist that it bought down, crushing the Engel's skull and sending dark ichor rushing forth from the ruined unit. Denser than water, the Hamshall remained upright for a few seconds, LAI systems trying to overcome the change in mass and death of the ACXB entity, and valiantly, yet briefly, holding out. Over the comms, Lieutenant Samantha Border could be heard screaming, the agony of the brain-death of her attuned Sekhmet flooding through her mind, before the morale filters kicked in, locking her out of the network.

Slowly, though, through the dense water, surrounded by the dark clouds of its own blood, Sekhmet toppled. The Star Spawn, though, grabbed the body and supported it, slumped over its killer. And, so, the round of retaliatory charge beam shots, tearing through the water as arcanomagnetic fields, tunnel-shaped, pulsed into existence for just a fraction of a second, enough to guide their cargo to its destination, hit the wreckage of the Hamshall instead, both layers of armour plating and the organism between them serving as a shield for the monster.

The charge beams immediately began their cooldown-recharge cycle, dumping vaporised coolant into the water, bubbles rising in a matter more akin to a shockwave than a stream, as they built up the charge on the capacitors, the power required for the particle beam beyond even the capacity of the onboard D-Engine to provide. And that was when the Star-Spawn acted again, back into motion with an organic elegance which only a highly trained expert at Engel communion could possibly hope to match.

The flash of something that was not mere awareness, nor limited sapience, but genuine, superhuman (in both nature as well as capacity) intelligence in its eyes said everything. This was not some dumb animal, equipped by its masters to fight, nor was it a lobotomised warmachine, implants in its brain linking it to a lifeform it could have torn apart without a thought had it been whole. No, it knew about the charge beams that the Hamshalliam used, knew their performance characteristics, and knew that their low rate of fire was what they sacrificed in return for firepower that could even hurt a being like it.

Pulling the hyperedged blade from the limp hand of Sekhmet, it made one, violent movement that ended with the sword embedded in what would have been the throat (had the ACXB organism been human) of another Engel, twisting and pulling up, in a way that shattered the monoedged weapon, shards of metal shrapnel tearing into the flesh of the mecha. The hilt remained in its hand; it slammed the remains of the blade into the open wound, ichor flooding the already worryingly opaque waters as it opened up the wound, twisting as it hurled the dying Engel at the seven remaining.

"Where the hell has it gone!" yelled the _amlati_ lieutenant, Tera. "Sonar and thermals are wrecked by the cee-bee venting, and now visuals are d... Lucy! Behind you!" he yelled at one of the other surviving members of his squadron, who turned and spun immediately with the hyperedged blade; a wise move, as the sword flicked into the arm of the Star-Spawn, its own blood joining the vital fluids that filled the water, causing it to flinch,slightly, but just enough that the blow that was aimed at the Engel's skull went wide.

There was slightly hysterical laughter over the radio, the pilot flooded with the hunger and rage of the machine, as the Hamshall latched onto the arm that had tried to crush its skull in, feeder tendrils tearing into the flesh and entangling the limb, opening the wound that her blade had caused as her war-beast ate of its foe's flesh and drank of its blood..

"Swamp him, you fuckers!" yelled the pilot, Lucy, as she tried to grab the other arm with her own, the integral charge beam still venting superheated gas. "Pin it down and kill..." her voice was broken with by a scream that her Hamshall echoed, as the tail of the Star-Spawn darted out, punching right through the thigh of the Engel. A beat of its wings, and the entangled pair were launched from the bottom, arcing to slam down with more force, rolling over and over.

The Star Spawn, maw spread wide, managed to end up on top in the rolling mass of armour and alien flesh and tentacles, and promptly began to consume the feeder tendrils of its foe with its own, tearing them off its arm only to pull them into its gullet with the prehensile manipulators. A blow from the newly freed arm to the torpedo tubes on the front of the Engel crushed the seals on the remaining weapons, detonating them in a blast which smeared Lucy against the inside of her entry plug and left the Star Spawn bleeding from the wounds to its face, flesh flayed off its unnatural endoskeleton.

Through the clouds of dilute ichor and the chaos and confusion of the fight, a particle beam reached out, and stroked the back of the ancient monster, right at the joint where the left wing merged with the back. There was no blood this time; only a shockwave that forced the oxygen in the water out of solution, fizzing as it superheated. And then the wing detached, the lack of damage to the now-severed limb a testament to the unnatural toughness of the flesh of the Star Spawn.

"Got him!" yelled Captain Koru, as his charge beam began another lengthy recharge cycle. "Hit the limbs!"

The Star Spawn began to sink, as it paused, limp with shock, its tail, more akin to the guard-tentacle of a squid than anything that a mammal might have, twitching frantically.

Pain flooded through the depths of the mind of Yul'uth-ca. He was aware, through a process akin to how other creatures might know were their limbs were without seeing them, that his left wing was detached, floating loose. And despite this academic knowledge, his wing-muscled still contracted, the imbalance causing its remaining twin to slam him once again back into the floor of the sacred place, tearing up the delicate murals and crushing the mosaics, as the impact cracked through the decorations and flattened him against the dark stone of the walls of the bowl. Worse still, the impact opened up the charred flesh from the severed wing, a fresh current of ichor polluting the waters.

And he could see the crippled shapes around him, in the higher dimensions. It was a feeling akin to being surrounded by the living dead, crude lurching shapes that hungered and screamed and raged, but lacked any traits that would have shown that they were really living, really aware.

That was perhaps what did it. He had removed Лu-hvean'tahæn from the place it had rested since the construction of this holy place and, indeed, before the least caves of what had become the city of now-doomed Guh'thya-leh'yi had been inhabited by the ancient Deep Ones, prior to their Choosing. But he had not intended, once his hands had closed around the blessed artefact, to actually use it in anger.

That had changed.

This was one of the holies of holies, a sacred place ancient beyond belief. It was sanctified, and it was blessed in ways that the feeble religious delusions of lesser races could not understand, uncomprehending of the sorceries which empowered this place. And these... things, these lobotomised... blasphemies! They would dare intrude upon it! They would dare try to hurt him! He would forgive them, for they knew not what they did.

But their human pilots? That was another matter. There truly was no better place to unleash Лu-hvean'tahæn than in here.

He spoke, a deep bass rumbling that pulsed through the water, and, had his foes been unprotected by their armoured blasphemies, would have been felt in their bones. And, coincidentally, left them writhing on the floor in pain, bleeding from all kinds of interesting orifices, some of them which they would not have possessed before he had spoken.

If only.

**Лu-hvean'tahæn** he said, speaking the tongue of Ry'lehan the way that it was really meant to be. This was not the inaccuracy rendition of either of the lesser species, who lacked the correct apparatus to even hear some of the differences, let alone pronounce them. No, this was Ry'lehan as spoken by its native race. **r'kgehq'r lbhe-fr'ys se'bz gur r'kgen-q'vzraf-v'bany ubyqvat fu-ryy, naq fr'g 'hc!**

Broadband electromagnetic radiation flooded the vast chamber, a pulse of light which, to the human eye, appeared white, but to a being that saw more of the spectrum (or indeed, a technological device), spoke clearly of its unnatural nature. There were no absorption lines, no refractions, and no phase delays. It was not so much that the light had been emitted, as that it had come into being, photons flashing into existence only to interact with that which was already there.

There were gargled screams from the Hamshalliam, as they saw the light too, the first thing they had seen in their unnatural lives, the vat-grown constructs implanted with their cybernetics before they had been permitted even the low levels of intellect that they possessed. The ruined Engel that lay on its back, chest-cavity crushed by the detonation of its munitions began to spasm violently, the sensation too much with Lucy, its pilot, her communion with the thing broken by dead, no longer there to function as a higher mind.

But the light did not fade entirely. Arising from the hole which its impact had cracked in the elaborately painted floor, the Star Spawn stepped, the one remaining wing aloof. It did not look the same. Where once it had worn (and worn was the right word, for they had obviously been garments) what had looked like robes and armour, now a whitish-purple carapace extruded over the skin underneath, horrifically organic in appearance. Each contour of the limb was mimicked, each trait exaggerated, until the figure in imperial purple and corpse-like white which rose from the place that it had fallen, was more like some twisted angelic parody of its former self, more akin to a scaled version of the titanic statue that stood behind it than that which it had once been. The flowing hieroglyphs of Ry'lehan covered the armour, picked out in gold and silver and colours that shifted and crawled across the surface, never constant yet eternally the same.

In its hand, it held a sword, bearing most resemblance to the twisted cousin of a straight-edged European blade. It was not one of the ornate, curved blades of the Deep Ones. It was a weapon of war, designed for killing by edge and tip, although it would, if needs be, settle for irrevocably maiming. And it was the source of the light; sick fractures, like a broken diamond refracting light from distant stars, rippling and twisting, tightly embracing the blade and leaving it surrounded by ghostly refractions of what might be and what once was. Or perhaps what would be, and what used to be, but was no longer.

Such distinctions meant little to the little shard of divinity, constructed through procedures of such unspeakable complexity and requiring such knowledge of the universe, that they were nigh-akin to the greater beings of the universe in their own right.

"_'Yn-ffra f'vr haf fvr ny-yr, z'rva Zrv-f'gre g'bgra. V-pu 'ova or-erv'g_," spoke the awakened god-mind of Лu-hvean'tahæn, in the archaic variant of Ry'lehan that it used; kin to, but not identical to the dominant strain of the language. It had already made itself open to Yul'uth-ca, and the Star Spawn reached out mentally towards it, gazing into the higher dimensions, and seeing the bulk of (the device? The entity? Which was it, and did it make a difference?) Лu-hvean'tahæn expanded throughout space, its merest projection this source of power. There were those who matched the power of this ancient race; the statue that stood in this underground grotto was of one who had exceeded them. But they were ancient beyond belief, and strange, almost beyond comprehension.

Still, it acknowledged his mastery. And perhaps that was enough.

A few paltry shots crawled through the air towards it, the mind of Лu-hvean'tahæn showing him their passage through this tiny bubble of the dream of the Demon-Sultan, even as his main mind watched the Guard of Yog-Sothoth come into being before him, such things absorbed and nullified by the fractured light.

The Star Spawn raised its blade, a trail of cracks in the very substance of reality trailing behind it, like a sparking after-trail, and charged the nearest Engel. The angel-like figure, lit by the strange wrongess of the light of its blade, may have only had one wing, but it could still swim, and it bought the blade down, both hands on the handle, on the head of the blasphemy before it.

Captain Koru dodged the approaching one-winged avenger, throwing Eremiel to the side, and so the blade only removed the right arm of the Hamshall, the unutterable sharpness slicing through the limb without any hint of obstruction. Fresh blood filled the water around them, only to be blown away by the impact of multiple short-ranged laser blasts against the Star Spawn's back, the steam explosions as the energy was re-radiated by the armoured carapace that now surrounded it clearing the water of blood. The stab of a hyperedged blade followed the blasts, which had been fired as the attack lunged, and that managed to penetrate one of the holes opened by the blasts, digging in, before stopping as Yul'uth-ca removed the offending limb at the shoulder, a diagonal slice which continued down, severing the Engel diagonally. The beast clad in purple and white spun, and finished off Eremiel, the coup-de-grace impaling straight through the entry plug.

There were only four Engels intact, now; the blood and bodies of the other thown around like dolls in the terrible currents that the fight was generating.

"Koru is down! I have senority," barked Tera, the _amlati_ Lieutenant. "Pull back, pull back. Back up to the entry! We can't hold that thing off here at close range with that sword-thing, we need long range firepower, _Insha'Allah_ ... is it still a Knight-class any more? Fall back!"

The beast roared, as it saw its prey try to retreat, the ripple in the higher dimensions as the A-Pods tore at them for thrust.

**z'lfrys pn-aab'g or q'rsr-ngrq! Cthulhu'ybeq jn'gp-urf bire z'r,** it screamed to the statue of its god that stood in the chamber. They were retreating, and their weapons could hurt him, he knew. Pushing off from the bottom legs and tail beating, the remaining wing assisting as best it could, it headed for the nearest one.

Laser fire streaked down from the roof, as the pursuit finally bought the fighters into weapons range of the two Ish, up in the hole in the flat ceiling. Emptied of torpedoes, they were limited by the way their laser cannons diffracted in water, making them useless and unable to hurt anything armoured beyond a certain distance. The Star Spawn roared, taking the blows on its arm, but the Ish adjusted their aim, and it could not stop everything. But that didn't matter. Even without its wings, it was faster than the Engels. Notably so.

"It's catching!" yelled Tera, his grey face taking on a faint, haemoglobin-red tint. "Get away! I'll slow it down!"

He spun his Hamshall, now head down, while keeping the A-Pods leading him upwards, with the right arm stretched out, as if tempting the sword-wielding monstrosity. The charge beam was levelled right at the Star Spawn's head. And so the sword removed it.

Just as planned.

The other arm, wielding the hyperedged blade cut down, slashing as hard as the unnatural strength of the Hamshall could swing it on the arm that had just removed his Engels' arm. The impact generated a terrible screech, as the top layer of the purple and white carapace was stripped away lengthwise, peeling up the arm. The laser mount fired wildly, but the flow of movement did not bring the beam into contact with the Star Spawn, which jerked away from the motion, bringing itself back into position. The feeder tendrils of his Hamshall lashed out, though, and entangled the arm, even as the tail of the Engel acted as a new limb, wrapping around the neck of the creature and trying to throttle it.

And that was when Pecna slammed into the pair, A-Pods set to maximum, sending the three of them sprawling into the statue, tumbling wildly over its surface, smearing it with ichor. In the tumble, the AT-Field wrapped around Лu-hvean'tahæn carved deep gashes over it, until the Star Spawn, expressing an emotion best compatible to shock, willed the Guard of Yog-Sothoth not to be. They would have to rebuild the entire statue, now, for it had now been desecrated through his actions, even if they were in its defence. The revue was broken, though, as he was forced to raise Лu-hvean'tahæn into the way of an oncoming blow from a hyperedged blade, the two swords, each over ten metres in length, bouncing off each other with terrible recoil that left both arcanoxenobiological organisms spinning away from each other in the water. While that blasphemy was distacted, he grabbed the other one, bleeding from its head where all of its feeder tendrils had been pulled out, at the roots (Tera's pained screams filling the network before the morale filters locked him out), by its throat, and slammed it against the profaned statue. Once. Twice. Three times, until liquefied unnatural flesh began to seep out of the cracks in the armour around the breast plate.

With the one remaining arm of his Engel, Tera punched the Star-Spawn in the face, grabbing its armoured tentacles, beam laser set to maximum, carving into its purple-and-white skull-like face and pulling hard, even as he gasped for air as the pain of Jibril filled him. Without detaching its hand, he slammed its head into his own, using the fact that it was pulling him against that profane statue to get leverage. It relaxed slightly, perhaps stunned, and he used the opportunity to thrust his barbed tail into the root of the creatures own tail, trying to cripple its swimming muscles. He slammed his fist on the torpedo launch button, too, aware that they wouldn't have armed this close; merely trying to use them as a kinetic impactor.

Pecna bought the spin under control, and raised his charge beam at the back of the Star Spawn, enmeshed with Jirbil and Lieutenant Tera. He fired, and the beam slammed into the back of the creature, which let out a screech. The back was cracked open wide now, hideous organs and clouds of blood (the same colour as the Hamshalls) spewing forth, in a volume disproportionate to the size of the creature. It tore away from Tera, taking his Engel's other arm with it. The agony shot though the mind of the pilot, and he fainted, losing all communion.

Pecna was not so lucky. Лu-hvean'tahæn, aflame once again with the will of the Outer Gods, removed his swimming-tail, as he fled. The Star Spawn slammed its clawed hand into the breast-plate of the Engel, over and over, until it cracked, and it could reach in, pulling out the enrty-plug, cables and tubing surrounding it which had tied directly into the central nervous system of the lobotomised ACXB organism. It went into spasms, with the removal and death of its attuned pilot, with the tearing sound of its own flesh as it tried to force its own guts back in.

Two Hamshall left. Yul'uth-ca pushed off from the floating Engel, dead in the water beside him, and bore down on Lieutenant Zuly, who desperately tried to thrust away from the monster who had mission-killed, at the very least, seven Engels identical to hers in less than three minutes.

A sixth sense... no, that was not the right term, for the Star Spawn had far more than six senses. Even humans had far more than six. A higher sense alerted Yul'uth-ca to the danger behind him, and he spun, one raised in warning, as he called upon the fundamental nature of reality and of the powers of Лu-hvean'tahæn. The charge beam shot, arcanomagnetic tunnel popping into existence to guide the protons, and clashed with the AT-Field before its hand, fractured spacetime writing and twisting before its outreached hand. For just a fraction of a second, the explosion was frozen in space, up against the silvery mesh, almost digging into it, as the energy collapsed the phase space, each proton limiting the ways that the universe could be rearranged so that the next one did not hit.

In fact, it seemed like it was piercing the barrier.

But it was only for a fraction of a second, far less than was visible to the human eye, and the beam exploded outwards when the arcanomagnetic field, designed for the tiny amount of time it took a relativistic particle to propagate, disappeared, no-longer opposing the mutual repulsion of the charged protons. It bloomed and flattered itself against the Guard of Yog-Sothoth, and when the water around it, superheated to an opaque plasma, and the resultant steam explosion cleared, the Star Spawn still stood, shimmering field intact.

That was when the second shot, from the Hamshall Azrael who was directly behind Yul'uth-ca, pierced the back of his helmet, breaking through the _onee'vre-wn'p-x'rg_ that Лu-hvean'tahæn had built around him, and punched through his head, the relativistic protons leaving his skull through his eye. But it was not a clean hole, no; such things did not happen in real life. The impact of the high energy particles with the atoms in their way, protons into proton and neutron and the stranger matter that made up the creature, which had flown to earth from beyond the stars, left strange particles quickly born into a cold cosmos in which they were not stable; the uncharged ones leaving the arcanomagnetic field in all directions, while the charged ones bounced around inside the tunnel of discontinuous force, before its cessation left them free to escape, too.

Azrael began to make a strange noise, a gurgling, roaring noise which echoed through the chassis and left the fluid in the entry plug vibrating, a distinctly peculiar sensation.

**hilarious** he emoted, as he began to move towards the foe without any prompting from Zuly within, who was trying to deal with the sensation of the fluid in your lungs buzzing. She really wanted to throw up, right now. **hilarious.**

More shots lashed out, from the few surviving Engel units, punching through the armour that it had made for itself in many ways. Perhaps the damage done had weakened it, or perhaps it could only take a few hits before it became purely ornamental. Either way, the Star Spawn did nothing, apart from reach out with its free hand, towards the vast, kilometre-high statue that filled this underwater temple. The fingers twitched spasmodically, more through residual instinct than anything conscious. Through fading sight, it saw the third Engel that it had killed pull itself to its feet, ribcage wide open, a hint of red blood seeping from the crushed entry-plug revealed within, and swim towards him, feeder-tendrils waving.

**p'yri-re****... t'vey...** it managed, through a ruined mouth, voice quiet, before the first of the Engels bundled it, the arcanocyberxenobiological organisms jumping the arcanoxenobiological organism like a wolf-pack taking down a lion.

But it was only natural for the Hamshalliam to act like a social pursuit predator. They had a little bit of human in them.

One hyperedged blade lodged itself in his torso, twisted in through the _onee'vre-wn'p-x'rg_, then a second. They were firing at him from point blank range, too, blue-green lasers punching holes and vaporising flesh in small explosions.

And then, from behind, Azrael latched onto the hole in the head that the charge beam had caused, feeder tendrils thrust deep in, penetrating the wound. Yul'uth-ca began to die the Death of the Little then, the death of self, as the feeling overwhelmed him. The tentacles moved in and out, teasing the gap wider and wider, pushing more of themselves in as they scooped out the insides, and pulled them into the maw of the Engel.

Yul'uth-ca lost all sense, then, as his lobotomised kin, grown in vats, twisted and modified through the addition of alien genetics, implanted with controlling cybernetics, and used as weapons by uplifted apes whose kin had most resembled rodents when he had been spawned, tore him to pieces, tearing at his flesh and devouring his soul.

"Tasty. Eat. Love," whispered Zuly, as she consumed the head of the Star Spawn. And the other Hamshalliam were doing the same, whether through piloted control or otherwise, eating of the flesh of the Star Spawn, and drinking of its ichor, a pack of ravenous predators.

The consumption of Yul'uth-ca went on for quite a long time, the Engels in a feeding frenzy, the pilots unwilling, dead, or simply unable to stop them.

Finally, though, it was over. The torn pieces of the Star Spawn, one shredded limb still reaching out to the statue that dominated the room, were spread over a wide area, the waters filled with the ichor of the thing.

**tasty**, emoted Azrael.

"Yes," said Zuly, her voice filled with self-loathing and shame. It was horrible, it was unnatural, and it was true. It **had** been tasty, and her stomach now felt heavy and full, endorphins flooding her system.

**look. there. examine. now** added the Engel.

The Nazzadi could feel the Hamshall pointing, its thoughts showing her where she should look. She... no, Azrael, she reminded herself, reached out, and brushed aside the consumed remains of the Star Spawn.

And the hand rested upon Лu-hvean'tahæn.

~'/|\'~

Second Lieutenant Hupuna was, by most reckonings, a fairly good man. He was generous to charities, was happily married (without children, through their own choice), and (relatively) punctual and efficient in his duties as a monitoring officer.

It could be said,, therefore without much fear of correction, then, that he did really not deserve to be the one who discovered what he did. Strings of data poured down in front of his eyes, the hard contacts (permanently implanted into his eyes; among other things, able to manipulate his field of vision to produce realistic shadows for AR projections, and generally capable of supporting a much higher resolution and realism factor than the older, pre-implant AR glasses or goggles) slightly warmer than the surrounding tissue from the waste heat they produced.

He leant back, and ran a hand against the side of his face. Yeah, he really needed to shave tomorrow. But, really, what he wanted was coffee, and the nanofactory wasn't working right now. The thing had blackscreened, right in the middle of making a sandwich, and got stuck. The end result that not only was the nanofactory not working, but now all the break room stunk of ham, because it got stuck on a loop while weaving protein for the meat-substitute, and as a result had wrapped the machine in the white-pulpy mess of pre-flavouring protein, making it exceptionally hard to actually get to the power to turn it off at the mains. At least he hadn't been the one who had got rather more sandwich than he had asked for.

But, the problem was that he wanted coffee, dammit.

He opened his eyes, and looked around the room. The rest of the staff were sitting around, fixed at their computers, or sitting back, eyes closed, letting the direct manipulation of their visual system that the hard contact system provided give them the information they needed, hands on joysticks. The images in front of his eyes dimmed, becoming no more than pale ghosts. He closed them again, and they returned to full strength, as his retina was once more cut out of the loop, and moved his field of view to the two-dimensional projection of the northern radar scans.

"_Amli katu wha disnu..._" he breathed in shock, hands scrabbling for the time slider. He pulled it back. The massive number of signals, big ones too, not just recon craft by any means had just... appeared, ten seconds ago.

It couldn't be real, could it?

Could it?

"We have..." he paused, wetting his lips, which suddenly seemed far too dry to even speak, "we have... multiple massive anomalous signals on Grid Bravo-Alpha-069, inclination 078, azimuth 007. LAI is analysing veracity... uh, it can't be.... uh, the LAI can detect no technical problems. They're massive! So many returns! Right up, lunar orbit, but coming in fast! Really, really fast! Someone, someone else get a _harangy_ look at this on a different set, see it isn't a problem with me."

Behind him, he could hear the sound of chairs pushed aside, and footsteps. He continued to stare at the display painted across his visual field.

"Uh... we have matches for, oh... there's more... more!"

"Lieutenant Hupuna, report!" It was Iruly, the superior officer, and, technically, his younger sister. Well, younger half-sister. Younger, much more ambitious and intelligent half-sister, who actually wanted the promotions, rather than staying stuck as an radar operator (actually, it was more complicated than that, but the term "radar" had stayed) for all her career.

"Yes, Iruly," he muttered. "Ah, looks like... 33... 34... no, that's a double blit, 36." He swallowed. "I can't believe I'm actually saying this. Thirty-six Swarm Ships, forty-four, plus or minus anomalies, Drone dropships, and two anomalous contacts, which don't match anything that I've seen before. They're massive!"

"Get someone else on this data-set!" shouted Iruly, somewhere in the blackness outside his head. "It's got to be some kind of error!" He could feel her voice turn to him. "36 Swarm Ships," she said slowly, her voice laden with doubt. "That's stupid. That's impossible. That's... impossible. That's more than they've deployed in one place... ever! That's more than they have active on the Eastern European Front.

Another voice spoke. "Uh... yes, we have confirmation. Multiple other stations are calling in, too, and we've been told to track the cluster with everything we've got. If it's a lie, then HQ are fooled, too."

"Order of thirty-five Swarmers, forty-five Drones, and two anomalies?"

"Yes, Captain Iruly. That's... well, assuming that they're packed into the Drones like normal, there's ten-odd division-equivalents in them; anywhere from one-fifty thousand to two hundred thousand hostiles in those things, probably about half Blanked, half Bugs."

"Impossible! Where are their targets?"

"At the moment they're high enough that they're covering all of Europe. Forces are scrambling, but..."

"What prompted this?" Iruly asked frantically, hyperventilating. "This is completely out of character! What are they doing? And where are those forces from? Where did they come from?"

Lieutenant Hupuna shrugged unconsciously, answering the question. "I don't know. I rewound it. One second... there, the next, not. And look at the gees that they're pulling. That's got to be 20-plus. That's red jam level, isn't it?"

"I think so, for us, at least." There was a pause, as other voices talked. "You mean it's there? Could they have compromised our coverage? Are they radar ghosts? _What's going on!_"

"Please..." he said, screwing up his eyes, even though it did no use, the hard contacts having subverted his optical nerve. "I'm trying to work out what the 5 klom anom... _harangy_! _Harangy_!" He clutched at his forehead.

"What happened?" Iruly asked, concern in her voice even over her panic.

"You can't see it? You can't hear it? The noise!"

There was a pause. Then;

"No. Because I don't have an active set of hard contacts," she said, slowly.

"Gods, so many alarms. They're screaming in my head. And the heat!" He moaned again, and took several shuddery breaths. "Massive energy signal from one anomaly, then another. Like some kind of nuclear blast or something, but directional. Can't read a rad-count, might be weapons, might not..." he traced a finger along a line invisible to everyone else, "it's still there, and still flaring. It's like a continuous blast or something... rapid delta-v."

Iruly stared down at her half-brother, slumped down at his command console, one hand at the keyboard (rendered in the hijacked optical nerve exactly as it was in the real world), one finger waving in empty space. "Hupana," she said, taking a deep breath. "You said that they were five kilometres long, right?"

He nodded.

"And the energy signature... it couldn't be an engine, could it? A real, actual, reaction drive, not arcanotech A-Poddery?"

"Uh..." he sucked in air between his teeth, "... I guess it could be. It's directed, if that helps."

Captain Iruly looked around the room, left and right, wringing her hands together. "Right," she said, finally. "Make sure that everything we get keeps on going straight to Int-HQ. I don't want any excuses. It has to work. And, now," she said, trying to keep the wobble out of her voice, "I have to make a few phone calls."

She managed to get to outside the room, before her legs gave way, and she slumped against the wall, dry sobs welling forth. At least her subordinates wouldn't see this, she thought pathetically.

_A multi-kilometre anomaly with a reaction drive. That's not a in-atmosphere craft, like the Swarm __Ships they use, which just happen to be void-capable. No, we've seen torch-flares out in the outer system like this. That's what I did my PhD on._

That's a real Migou warship.

And two of them have come to Earth, in the middle of the biggest single bug deployment I've ever seen.

...

We're all going to die.

~'/|\'~


	18. Chapter 15a: CATOclysm: Termination

**Chapter 15a**

CATOcylsm: Termination

~'/|\'~

**it hurts so much. pain is her existence, now. for a subjective eternity.**  
_Twinkle, twinkle, little star_  
**she floats, in darkness. **  
_How I wonder what you are. _  
**they reach out and touch her but they don't **_**touch**_** her.**  
_Up above the world so high _  
**they shouldn't touch her.**  
_Like a diamond in the sky _  
**not like that.**  
_Twinkle, twinkle, little star _  
**not ever.**  
_How I wonder what you are! _  
**she screams as it happens, water and fire and pain and death and abomination and horror and fear and terror and panic and screaming and confusion and agony and cessation all brushing against her mind, and she feels it all. **  
_When the blazing sun is gone _  
**that was a long time ago.**  
_When he nothing shines upon _  
**she screams as it happens, fire and death and pain and horror and flesh and nightmares and dead mothers and decay and tearing and tiny things that crawl inside the lungs and the eyes and eat them and she feels it all.**  
_Then you show your little light _  
**this is now.**  
_Twinkle, twinkle, all the night. _  
**she stirs.**  
_Twinkle, twinkle, little star, _  
**she wakes from her slumber, eternally lying dead but dreaming.**  
_How I wonder what you are! _

~'/|\'~

The sky was on fire.

Well, technically that wasn't true. But night had already fallen again, the day this far north in winter only a few short hours which had already passed, and the smoke from the Reykjavik pseudo-arcology, which the Dagonites had called _Cthulhu'ybeq Ahefrel_, were lit from below, to create a crimson sky. From the exterior feed from the outside of the Ranger AFV, the damage which the invasion had done was evident. No building was left untouched; even the least damaged had holes through their façade, punched through by plasma beams, railgun slugs or necklaces of bullet scars.

The camera panned to a ruined fountain, high pressure water jetting out of the ruptured mains pipes only to fall back to earth as a cold mist, freezing solid on the ground. There were the remnants of a statue at the peak, carved out of some black stone. One wing remained intact; the other, along with the head and the parts of the torso that had connected the two were gone, shattered upon the ground.

"You got that?" muttered Antonio.

"Yeah," replied his cameraman, hands dancing over the controls as he coordinated the suite of LAI-assisted drones that flocked around the Ranger, filming the environment. "It'll make a great 'defining image' for the package. 'Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair', and all that."

"Uh... we're coming up to an intersection. Try to see if you can get a full shot of that spire... no," he said, highlighting a tall building backlit by the fires and the remaining Dagonite searchlights, leaning over at almost thirty degrees, the slanted outside plagued with scars, "that one."

"On it." Varuata said. "What do you think did that? How's it still standing?"

One of the troops escorting them leaned over; the AR projection against their contacts (only soft contacts, not the permanent hard contacts or the optical nerve jacks that were starting to enter the market) tagged him as Sergeant A. Richards. "The slanting one? Yeah. If it's one of those cabletowers, then the cables on one side got hit, and then something hit the building, too."

"They're a real bugger," added one of the soldiers. "They're easy to build; you anchor the rods with cables, like a tent, and then you build around the inside, but they fall apart. And the fish-fuckers love their coilsnipers."

"And those _harangy_ CW2 gyrojets," added another solider. "So damn crude that they sometimes work even through the emfog. Launch from cover, then home in on the spotter's target."

"Are... there are coilsnipers up there?" asked Antonio, concern in his voice.

Sergeant Richards shrugged. "Not on that tower. You'd have to be an idiot to stay up there. It's going to fall any minute."

There was a pause, as the two journalists shared a look.

"I'll keep a drone on it," said Varuata.

"Good idea." Antonio turned to face the soldiers again. "So, how long until we get to the site?"

"Ten minutes out, assuming the area remained clear."

There was a jolt, as the AFV pulled behind an abandoned barricade and opened fire, the snap of superheated air audible through the hull as the laser pulsed its way along the front of a ruined tenement. An explosion sounded nearby and bullets pinged off the armoured vehicle.

"Well, mostly clear," added the sergeant, clutching his rifle closer in the somewhat cramped cabin, the mass of the empty powered armour taking up space for two men. To Antonio, the way the armour's LAI set the soldier's combat armour eyeholes to opaque removed all humanity from the already skull-like face. "What've we got?"

"Squad of tangos, hostile heavy weapon is down," yelled back the gunner, targeting the general area of the fire and letting the LAI do the fine work before firing. "Look like militia... that's one of the CW2 one-twenty mike-mikes they give to the goons. We're just mopping up. No real threat."

Sergeant Richards looked back to the journalists, and relaxed. "Acknowledged. Yeah," he continued. "The armour and the Papa-Alphas have already been through, and the Echo-9s have the place covered, so... yeah," he summarised.

"Bit pathetic, really," added another one of the identical looking soldiers, her voice the only indicator of her gender. "The militia are just brainwashed cultists, mostly."

"Yeah, well," said the sergeant, "we're off to see one of the romeo-camps with the journos. Once you've seen one... the fish-fuckers don't get any sympathy from me. Wish we could use some bee-cee-nam, like we did in Santander, but that'd remove the point of rescuing the poor buggers. Hells, en-bee-cee-nam would be better, but..." He shrugged, and glanced up at Antonio, no flesh at all visible under the almost skull-like visage of the infantry combat armour. "You covered what the fish-fuckers do before?"

Varuata shook his head. "Yes. We were in Santander, too. R&R, actually, bad luck that they showed up. Closest ones to the place. You know those videos of Valkyrie coming in?"

"No way! That was you?"

"Yeah." He raised his hands. "Wasn't even using drones for that; didn't get them until after they'd mostly been driven off. Old fashioned shoulder-cam and exosuit for that."

"Wow," said the female soldier who'd spoken before. "Those were awesome. And those helljumping nutters are fucking badass."

"I interviewed a few of them afterwards," added Antonio. "They are completely," he raised a finger, "and I mean, _completely_ and utterly bugshit insane, but, yes, they are awesome."

"We've been on the Eastern Front since then," continued Varuata.

"That's a cold fast one, isn't it? What do they call it? "Time and Tide", isn't it?"

The Nazzadi nodded. "Yeah. Hideous jamming; you can't use drones in most places, so you have to go in on foot. Both us and them are all about the attack, counter-attack. 'Cept when a cap-ship shows up; then they completely dominate the area, until the others can pull back to static defences. It's like some weird kind of trench warfare, 'cept instead of trenches, you have stuff that can hurt cap-ships. It's almost luck if you can get footage there... more like bad luck, almost, 'cause it means the bugs are hitting the sector you're in, and they'll pull back before reinforcements arrive.."

"Four minutes out," called the gunner from the front, over the intercom.

"But... yeah," said the sergeant, a morose tone creeping into his voice, as he returned to the original topic, "if you haven't seen what the romeo-camps are like, you should turn around and leave now. I just hope the killing hasn't started yet."

"What killing? By who?" asked Antonio, paling slightly.

"By the people we rescue," said the solider, who refused to say any more.

~'/|\'

Misato took it surprisingly well, all in all.

"I see," said the Major slowly, as she broke the link to her comms implants. "Information distribution authorised," she told the branch of the Total Information Tactical Analysis Network LAI that was handling the Nero operations.

There was a generalised commotion from the rest of the room, as the rest of the operations room responded in a less calm manner.

"Captain Martello," she said, turning to the NEG military liaison, "I want as much air cover as you can get me. Get Marcellus to send everything they can spare and then some. I don't care if that means that the other Task Forces have to take losses. Pull in any capital ships you can, too. We need to slow down the orbital forces enough to complete the ritual, and then take down the Herald."

The square-jawed man stared at her, jaw slightly open. "Are you insane?" he finally managed. "The entire naval assets used in CATO are smaller than the incoming Migou forces, even before the hostile warships and the losses we took from the Dagonite nuclear weapons are included. There's no way we can win."

"I know," said the Major, the glimmer in her eyes belying her calm expression. "That's why I clearly remember saying that we needed to slow them down."

He only worked his jaw a few times.

"The entire point of Operation CATO was the success of Nero," she continued. "If this fails, then we have damaged the entire strategic position of humanity for no gain, even if we don't take any losses from the Migou. Agent Tome," she continued, turning to the albino, "how long does the _Solomon Throne_ need?"

"To complete the ritual?" He checked his book-shaped PCPU, making a few quick adjustments. "Assuming we accept a 50% fatality rate among the sorcerers, and... fifty-three minutes. Plus an unknown period of time for the Herald to surface."

"Too long. Can you speed it up?"

Agent Tome stared back, impassively. "There is another way, but it will raise fatality rates further, and risk burning out the survivors, as well as possibly drawing extranormal attention. From a entity that is not Moloch. We can employ the Patrone System to its theoretical maximum."

"Do it. Your superior told me hold important Nero is to you, so you can risk it to ensure that the mission is completed. How long would that take, then?"

He blinked, twice. "Including the necessity to get authorisation? Seventeen minutes, plus or minus six minutes. That's assuming that our estimates for the entity's current wakefulness are accurate, of course. There's a very large margin of error here; possibly several hours."

"Can you be more precise?"

"No. We haven't _exactly_ done this before," the agent said, a hint of sarcasm creeping into his voice.

"Have you done something _similar_?" the Major snapped, aiming for the weak spot in his sentence.

Agent Tome licked his lips once, an unconscious gesture. "There exist other magma-dwelling creatures, although they were Knights, rather than Heralds, at most, and in almost all cases lesser threats than even that. However, none of the trials were anywhere near this deep. I cannot help you. It might teleport up instantly, it might swim up. We weren't exactly expecting the Migou to show up now."

"Wait? What trials?" interjected Captain Martello.

"That's classified. You did not hear that," said the albino, deadpan.

The Major tilted her head slightly. "Go! Get me everything, Captain. And, Agent, will your sorcerers accept those kind of losses?"

A faint smile crept over the albino's lips. "Oh, yes. They agreed to do this, understanding that they could die. They're aware of the need to do this."

"Then go do it. And then use your Special Services pull to get me even more forces. Go drag in Director Khoury; she made it clear that this is necessary."

The Captain saluted, the OSS agent merely nodded. "Understood."

Misato turned, and headed down to the main workstations, hands balled into fists, internally swearing with exceptional virulence in all the languages she knew.

_Migou. Why now! They want it too?_

She noticed the way that the operators and technicians were staring at her; with a degree of fear and what almost looked like concern. They hadn't heard the conversion; the noise cancellers around the command point should have seen to that, but the combination of the news and the body language was more than enough to set everyone on edge.

Misato leant over to Makota. "Open a channel to the Evas."

He continued to stare at her. "Major Katsuragi... it looks like you're keeping the Evas there. Under the biggest single fleet ever."

She stared at him. "Yes."

"They won't stand a chance! They're just children."

"No. They stopped being just children the day that each of them became one of the Children." The Major stared blankly up the main screen, tracking the projected landing area of the incoming Migou fleet. "And if we don't managed to eliminate that Herald, one way or another, we won't stand a chance either. Do you want it in the Migou's hands?" She paused. "Now, open a channel to all three Evangelion Units."

~'/|\'~

All across the ruins of the city, where the NEG had mostly gained control, the surviving gaggles of scattered troops, both Elect and Blooded among them, moved from building to building as best they could, ducking away from the searchlights from above when they swept over head. Each group was trying to get back to Dagonite-controlled areas, or were, desperately, trying to continue the fight.

"Come on, come on," said _Sv'fuzna-obff_ Guh'maena, striding at the front of the group, reduced to three after they'd made the mistake of poking their heads out when an armoured column, hover-tanks and mecha alike, were passing. He was bare chested, crude bandages wrapped over the morass of cuts that covered his chest from when a close-proximity blast had crushed his armour. "We can still smash them! We're not going to cower down below in the tunnels. We have faith in Lord Dagon, and he, in turn has faith in us! We shall not disappoint him. Have faith in yourself."

Yuh-kho'ui, anti-armour coilgun and what ammo she could carry after the death of her spotter slung over her shoulder, elbowed him. The male Blooded grunted in pain. "Keep it down, you _p'erg-va_," she hissed, feeling her nascent gills, still not permitting air across them, open and close in anger. "Look up!"

The brightness of a searchlight shone through the ruins of the roof, through the holes that shrapnel had torn in it. That wasn't the most worrying bit. The heretical forces of the New Earth Government didn't rely on visible light, especially when operating at night. There could be those spy drones up there, scanning the majority of the EM spectrum, and the first thing they'd know was when a missile got lobbed in through the roof, or those wasp-like gunships did a strafing run.

She looked back. "How are you holding up, Shem'oan?" she asked the operator of the exosuit behind them. It was crudely armoured up into a power armour, but its true purpose as a tool for digging tunnels like the ones which connected the underground shelters was clear, from its bulbous front profile and ornate frontal decorations. It wasn't even a militia vehicle, and the pilot was just a construction worker.

"Not too good," Shem'oan sniffed. "It doesn't matter. We're all going to die, anyway."

"Don't be a fool!" said Guh'maena loudly, turning around to face the other two. Stepping back, he grabbed the mining exosuit's hand, which could have crushed him with almost no effort, and stared at the eye-sensors on the front of the construct. "Listen to me. Survival isn't winning! Winning is winning! Listen! _Er-wrp'g p'bz-zba fraf'r 'gb z-nxr gur v'zcbf'f-voyr cbf'f-voyr! Vfa'g gung gur 'j-nl gung s'n-vgu e'by'yf?_" He paused. "You understand what we will achieve, because we have faith in Dagon and in ourselves?"

Shem'oan nodded within the exosuit, then realised that the honoured _sv'fuzna-obff_ could not see that. "Yes, my _Sv'fuzna-obff_," he said out loud, over the speakers.

"Good!" Guh'maena paused. "So, where are we?"

Yuh-kho'ui sighed. "We're in _Yr-neavat-v'fsha_ Primary," she said softly, dropping down below the window, staring out past the broken glass to the darkness outside. "We just need to make our way through the rest of _S'n-gny'evat-v'at_, and we can get to the fallback position."

"We shouldn't be falling back!" said Guh'maena, the sound of outraged faith in his voice. "We should be proud to give our lives in service to Dagon-_anzr_. One of the true faithful does not die even when they are killed!"

Slowly, the female Blooded drew her coilgun, deploying the bipod, and resting it on the broken window. "Don't say another word," she said, barely breathing. "I thought I saw a flash of movement through there... and get low!" she added, realising that she was dealing with a _Sv'fuzna-obff_; the kind of religious fanatic who wouldn't know the least about duties as a markswoman. She was going to really miss this, when her blood showed fully; the deterioration in vision was not going to be pleasant. Breathing slowly, she scanned the buildings across the street, over from the playground, looking for any movement.

There was the hypersonic crack of a railgun, which was deafening even with the ear protections in the masks that the Order infantry wore, and Yuh-kho'ui felt a spray of something warm (too warm in the cold night air) spray across her back. Reflexively she span, dropping the coilgun and drawing her pistol. In the strange-slowed time that an adrenaline-filled brain produced, she saw the mining exosuit take one step back towards the window and her, the other side of the room visible through the hole blown through the domed cockpit. The fluid sprayed across from the hole was dark, the colour unknown in this darkness. There was a bulky figure standing on the other side of the room, something wrong-looking about its face.

Impossibly, the mining exo-suit pulled itself from the fall, and took step forwards, its drill spinning up. A second step.

A second crack of the railgun, which tore the right leg of the suit clean off, sprayed the rest of the room with shrapnel and concrete splinters when the hypersonic slug tore into the floor. The exosuit began to fall, as did Guh'maena, his unarmoured torso torn apart by the shrapnel, that hyperedged sword he'd been so proud of clattering to the floor undrawn.

The Blooded woman had her pistol out and levelled by now, though, and she squeezed the trigger, the nine-millimetre bullets (a product, like so much of the Order's weapons, of the Second Cold War; that pistol calibre no longer saw use in the forces of heretical humanity) impacting against the figure, which twisted and ducked back behind the cover of the wall. She couldn't see that it'd had any effect. That was something they'd found with these NEG forces; even the infantry, when they weren't using those power armours or those odd heavy armoured suits, took multiple shots to take down, even if you could get through their armour. Resin casings clacked to the ground, as she kept shooting, through the thin walls of the school.

Yuh-kho'ui felt the pistol click empty, and scrabbled on the ground, trying to pull the coilgun back around, up from its position at the window. It'd be worthy shattering her shoulder if she could take this monster down.

_Lift and... up... and around._

The figure already had its rifle levelled at her even as she started turning back. A burst of three bullets danced its way up her chest; one through the sternum, one through a lung, and one shattering her right shoulder, like a trio of knives punching through the light armour issued to the marksmen of the Dagonite forces. She fell to the ground, her spasmodic trigger squeezing tearing holes in the ceiling before the coilgun fell from her hands.

Through darkening eyes, she saw Guh'maena twitch. In an odd clarity, the finger-long pieces of concrete protruding from his chest were clear, even through the fog that gathered in front of her vision. She knew what she had to do; the grenades were at her belt.

Her right shoulder was a mess of pulped meat and bone. She didn't have the strength.

One poster, drawn crudely by childish hands in paint, on the opposite wall became clear, as she gazed helplessly, unable to even move her head. The bright blue was so... pretty. Like the sky. And the mass of stars everywhere were just... right.

And then there was nothing.

Foxtrot 813 scanned the room for any other threats. A single bullet was spared for the one cultist that twitched on the floor, ensuring the elimination of the threat. When the inside of the exosuit was checked, the Replica found that the pilot had been pulped by the first shot. Evidently, the LAI control systems had merely been doing their best to keep the suit upright, and the second shot had been wasted on a threat which had been neutralised.

The fact that the movement had not matched how a LAI system would have moved was considered and noted.

The Replica shifted inside his armour. The pistol, light and obsolete though it had been, had hurt; not in the same sense as it would have hurt a human, but the existence of pain was acknowledged in the pseudo-sapience of the organism, the shard of soul behind its eyes moaning. According to the armour smart systems, two bullets had penetrated the hardplate, before being stopped by the mesh underneath. His armour integrity was severely compromised; more care would have to be taken against any hostiles engaged from now on.

The ammunition counter on his HUD was checked.

_ECU-IMFW-3  
20mm Railgun  
Standard – 3/8, /|\ 8  
EMP – 0/8 /|\ 3_

9mm AR  
DU – 23/40 /|\ 40  
FMJ – 0/40 /|\ 0

-

ECU-SIS-2  
15mm Automatic Pistol  
DU – 18/18 /|\ 18

-

Grenades:  
L7A2 Fragmentation – 2  
UT-42 Flash – 1  
FFB-1 Incendiary – 0  
CW-4 NECW - 0

He was starting to get worryingly low on ammunition for the assault rifle component of the IMFW-3; less than two full magazines remained. Before that, it would be worth acquiring weapons from enemies, even if there would be a loss in efficiency due to the fact that the weapons would not be designed for integrated use with his armour system.

There was an odd crackling in his radio system. User ID only displayed **UNKNOWN CONTACT**. Foxtrot 813 slapped the side of his helmet; nothing happened, apart from his HUD flickering slightly.

There was an odd noise at the edge of hearing... a simple tune, chiming in the distance, from the outside of the school building. The Replica, weapon raised, made his way to the window, stepping over the corpse of the female coilsniper.

Nothing. It was coming from one of the buildings on the other side of the street, one of the few without any signs of burning; the red glow of flames could be seen from inside many of the others. There was a dead tree on the pockmarked lawn outside, what had been one of the few, non-rooftop patches of green in this densely packed city. A lone swing hung from it, limply.

Foxtrot 813 levered himself over the ledge, and headed through the outside. The music was growing stronger. He had to find the source!

Something knocked against his shin. The Replica jumped back, weapon lowered. The Dagonites had been using large numbers of mines, and rollers were not unknown. The fact that he remained intact suggested that it was not an active threat, if he'd actually touched it, but...

It was an basketball, orange even in the night's darkness to the enhanced night vision systems of the Replica. The construct froze in place, while the LAI in his helmet tagged that it could not detect any traces of explosives. Slowly, 813 squatted down, and rubbed one armoured hand over its surface. His pseudo-sapient mind could not work out why it had suddenly moved like that.

"Unrecognised unit; IFF reads positive," came a voice over his communications system, loud, crisp and clear; the first such that he had heard since the destruction of his REV-8. "Possibly the source of the unknown transmissions." The voice was one he was programmed to recognise, one of the Replica variants, though not the same model as he was. "Identify yourself!"

He lowered himself into the crater, squatting next to the basketball. "Eidelon Combat Unit ORPH-PN1-012 Foxtrot-813."

"ORPH-PN1-012 Foxtrot-813," repeated the voice. There was a pause. "That unit was recorded as MIA."

"Correct. The assigned REV-8 Eidelon Powered Armour was mission-killed, and self-destruct protocols were carried out as usual, to deny asset to enemy forces."

His HUD picked up a flicker of movement, tagging a friendly unit; just there for a second before it was gone again.

"Foxtrot 813, a location is transmitted to your HUD. Regroup with forces there."

"Understood," answered the Replica, with a feeling of relief more intense than most humans would experience. It was back in contact with friendly forces, so the success of its mission would be increased.

There were four Replicas in the wet basement, clad in greyish-white semi-powered ultraheavy combat armour. Twenty-four yellow optical sensors were turned his way.

"Eidelon Elite Combat Units ORPH-ORPH-03 Kantya-12, Kantya-13, Kantya-14, and Kantya-15," stated one of the figures, only distinguishable by the fact that the HUD highlighted which one was communicating and their different armaments. " ORPH-PN1-012 Foxtrot-813, your current orders are now over-written. Synchronise orders with ORPH-OPRH-03."

Foxtrot 813 nodded. The Replica Elite had such an authority. Produced in much smaller batch sizes than the mainstream Type VIIs, they were also much more heavily enhanced. Although there were multiple genotypes among all the Replicas, even within a Type, the Elites were, without exception, based off a female template; further modified for endurance, strength, and lightning fast reflexes, and with added aggressiveness and cunning embedded into their pseudo-sapient psyches. Add that to superior armaments and armour, and the fact that they were directly under the control of Orpheus Command, and it could be seen how, if the Assassins were the knife of Project Eidelon, the Elite were the lance. The main limit was how much more difficult they were to handle, assigned to Orpheus Command exactly because only it had the spare capacity to sustain multiple Elite activations as well as keeping the rest of the forces active.

"Threat classified "Migou" has entered combat zone," stated Kantya-12. "Unlock combat library "Migou". Orders are to engage Migou and residual Dagonite forces which attempt to prevent evacuation of all assets in Task Force Nero. Destruction of all enemies forces is instructed as a secondary priority; they are to be eliminated. They all are to be eliminated."

"Understood," said Foxtrot 813.

_**fire**_

_**bodies**_

_**awakening**_

~'/|\'~

With the window to Command closed, the three pilots stared at each other.

"And now the Migou are showing up," said Asuka, flatly. She smirked. "Well, I've killed Swarm Ships before. Just follow my lead, and you'll be fine."

"Certainly," said Rei. She paused. "Where is the nearest high object to jump off?"

Asuka narrowed her eyes. "You're trying to make fun of me," she stated. "And, no, don't pretend to be innocent. You know exactly what you are saying."

"You were not referring you your past experience with the Migou?" Rei frowned. "Oh. I see. But after the previous Herald, we were told by Dr Akagi to try to avoid ripping holes in the fabric of space to create a Zone-like environment of infinite dimensions overwriting the standard 5+n. That may pose a problem, if we are to follow your example."

"What?" Asuka glared at Rei. "Oh, ha ha. Anyway, I'm pretty sure she was only joking. Or at least," the girl corrected herself, "being gratuitously sarcastic. Because, obviously, we should avoid blowing up the universe. And I'd like to note that I'm the only one who's fought the Migou befo..."

"Could we try to avoid the catfi... uh, I mean, the argument," interjected Shinji, hastily correcting himself after a piercing blue and a cold grey gaze locked onto him, "and maybe consider the fact that we're now going to be attacked by the Migou, while we're trying to protect a ship that's trying to summon a Herald, which we then need to capture, and then get away from here?" Shinji paused. "There may also be attacks from remaining fish-men forces," he added, as the sheer ridiculousness of the situation began to get to him. "I just hope the Yellow Storm doesn't decide to show up as well."

"Oh, it gets better," said Asuka, an almost identical tone in her voice. Shinji may have been prone to useless passive-aggressiveness, but, much as she was loathe to admit it, he was right. In that they needed to focus, of course, not that it was a catfight or anything like that. "Unit 01 is the only one with a properly-working long-range set of sensors. Because that blast managed to damage mine, and Unit 00's just got slagged by it. And Migou standard operations is to drop in from high orbit, if they're in an area where we don't have capital-grade defences; we certainly won't have the E-9 coverage once they arrive."

"Really?" asked Shinji, face turning a paler shade underneath the LCL.

"Yes. It's basic knowledge." Asuka growled. "And I'm armed completely wrong for this kind of thing. And you, you're not exactly doing too well, either. That thing you have is for shredding vehicles, not going against Swarm Ships."

"The most commonly encountered model of the class of xenotechnological vessel assigned the name "Swarm Ship" mounts, as its major armaments, one ventral plasma weapon and two nose-mounted weapons of the technological basis that have been deemed "null" weaponry. Despite the extreme inaccuracy of such a term," Rei added.

"Huh?"

"They possess three weapons which are capable of threatening an Evangelion with a single shot," explained Rei, tilting her head slightly. "There are thirty six of them. Moreover, the 45 "Drone Ships" mount an laser attuned to the near-mid ultraviolet of a similar, though lesser, threat level." She paused. "By my understanding, the warships will mount such armaments as to make..."

"Please, no more, Rei," said Shinji, weakly. "I get the picture. We'll all die if they attack us." He shivered, suddenly aware of the slimy feel of the LCL that surrounded him. "I never ever, ever thought it would end like this," he said, in full honesty.

"That is not necessarily true," she said, clinically. "And what I told you before Operation Ishtar still holds true. You will not die, because I will protect you. I can be replaced."

"Look, uh, I said you shouldn't say that kind of thing..." began Shinji, before Asuka, who had been sitting, listening to the conversation with growing rage as Rei enumerated exactly the trouble they were in, finally exploded.

"What the hell did the GIA, the OSS... just everyone think that they were doing!" she shouted. "Why didn't they foresee something like this happening! Argh! So _obvious_ that of course the bugs were going to do something like this!"

There was silence.

"Actually, when you say 'foresee'..." said Shinji, slowly.

"No," said Rei, her voice level.

"Uh... what exactly you mean?" he asked

"I mean, 'No'. I do not know." She squinted, eyes darting from side to side, in what looked like worry, gazing from the cluttered cockpit of Unit 00. "Everything is _strange_," she said slowly, a uncharacteristic tone of both fear and wonder in her voice.

"What are you talking about?" snapped Asuka.

"I cannot explain. You lack the context."

Back in her plug, the red-head fumed.

_The shear arrogance. Going around seeing the future and locking people into the actions that she sees, and acting like that when anyone questions her. She never explains herself. She's so damn quixotic. And she's always been like that._

She stared up at the skies, shifting her position to get her stupid broken sensors to work consistently. Stupid sensors. Stupid OSS. Stupid Rei.

In Unit 00, Rei stared at the morass of projections and displays that smeared the insides of the entry plug, many of them warning diminished functionality due to the damage from the blast.

_It was not meant to be like this. I do not understand._

_**fire**_

_**bodies**_

_**awakening**_

~'/|\'~

"_Solomon Throne_, this is Goetia Control."

There was a pause, as the link protocols ran. Then;

"Acknowledged, Goetia Control. Uplink is secure."

The albino sorcerer nodded, despite the fact that this was a **[VOICE ONLY]** connection. He made a few movements across the AR display, dragging new options together.

"Be aware, _Solomon Throne_, there are multiple hostile Migou capital ships, converging on your location."

"We are aware, Goetia Control; we have access to NEG military channels."

"Understood." Agent Tome paused. "Task Force Nero has chosen not to abort the operation. Repeat, operation is continuing. You are hereby instructed to move to Variant Three." He fell silent again, taking several deep breaths. Oh, sure, he might _pretend_ to the military and the Evangelion people that such orders didn't affect him, but that was a lie, to create a public persona for the OSS. "The fatality rate of Variant Three has been deemed acceptable. Moreover, you are instructed to employ the Patrone System to its maximum capacity, in a simultaneous dump."

"You are aware that this will add ten-to-fifteen percent to the fatality rate? And induce orgonic burnout in the survivors?"

The albino closed his eyes. "Yes," he said. "I am aware."

"I am afraid that you lack the authorisation to command this. We require authorisation from a Genesis-level authority."

"Patching you through to Director Khoury," Tome answered, making a series of complex movements in the AR array. There was silence for a minute. Then;

"Authorisation has been given, Goetia Command. After ritual is complete, we will engage stealth and evac as fast as possible, assuming success and no destructive backlash from use of Patrone."

"Acknowledged. Goetia Command out, _Solomon Throne_."

The three hundred metre ship, which stood upright in the excavated hole which the Order had dug, was now covered with a vast dome, memoform materials only enough to seal off the area and prevent undue influences from entering. The _Solomon Throne_ had seeded the area with nanites, and sped their operations up with broadcast power, relaxing the thermodynamic problems that such free-roaming nano-and-microagents had; the same ones which made the "grey goo" nanoweapons an impossibility. The area was now a black hollow, surface like black glass, with symbols and figures carved into it by the finely controlled lasers mounted on the outside of the ship. The Evangelions had been moved outside the crater, and were being kept away from the dome, standing unmoving vigil over the target location, sensors and eyes to the sky. They should have had nothing to do until the ritual had been completed; now, of course, things had taken a notable turn for the worse, from the viewpoint of the Office of Special Services and those pieces of the New Earth Government that knew about Nero's role.

Inside, the rows and rows of Special Services sorcerers, sat in acceleration couches that bound their limbs, wires threaded into their bodies and into the ports that connected directly into their cerebral implants, twitched. They were not really there, not mentally. Their consciousnesses were in a simulation, a fake world built in the dreams and soul of a preprepared subject, their psyche parapsychically reconstructed to make it an ideal site for such a ritual. After all, by conducting it in a dream, they were in fact conducting it in a location with the same location in the three dimensions of space and one of time that humanity was familiar with. It was merely the fifth coordinate which varied. And due to the fact that it was occurring in one soul, rather than many, metaphysically the ritual resembled one cast by a single, much more powerful lifeform, rather than many weak and flawed humans. It was an ingenious merger of the arcane and the technological; an exploit in the "laws" of sorcery which the mystics of earlier generations had held to. And a work-around the fact that, individually, humanity was fairly terrible at sorcery, the hard-wired limits on understanding as well as their individually rather pathetic reserves of ruach crippling any more intuitive, less ritualistic understanding of the subject.

So very human.

The dream-selves of the sorcerers stood on a vast white plane, no walls in sight, under a void-black sky. Across the featureless plane, vast markings were placed with perfect precision, carved into the server-mind through mental sculpting. Anchored by the identical, though much smaller carvings outside, they stretched into immensity. Each mental-projection was in place somewhere on the diagram, although their eyes could not resolve the nearest compatriot in the procedure.

They were not chanting. They were not praying. Within the sculpted mind which was the ritual site, they were in turn turned inwards, silent, as the equations flowed through their minds, each one solved in turn and in the correct order, describing precisely the flow of orgone through the host-psyche and downwards, into the Earth.

Down to Moloch.

There were three major schools of sorcerous practice in the New Earth Government, with a fourth arguably deserving inclusion. The Cassandran Practices were perhaps the simplest, and closest to how they had been before their public revelation. In a sense, they were not so much a unified school, as a collection of sorcerous procedures that much more accurately required the name "rites" or "ceremonies". Most spells which would be classified under the Practices were illegal, deemed too dangerous compared to the sterilised and tested versions of the Schools. The few which remained legal were the most basic ones, circles of Warding and Protection, or cruder, less effective (but easier to learn) versions of modern arcanotherapeutic procedures. Where they came into their own was on the summoning and binding of creatures; not through any particular innate brilliance (indeed, they were often horribly flawed, traps left by cultists and long-dead sorcerers as revenge to permit extra-normal entities access to the world), but simply because the practices of summoning and binding had been heavily restricted if not entirely illegal for all of modern times. Those who went into such fields, either through necessity (such as NEG-trained exorcists, working with the OIS and FSB), or through curiosity (a path which led so often to the consumption of the practitioner), were often forced into using the Cassandran Practices.

By far the most widely used was the Horakian School, and, arguably, the Lorenzian School. Both these systems were modern ones; devised and revised by old-school sorcerers who had gone legal, and used the desperation of pre-NEG governments to investigate this new science to secure massive grants, funding, and teams of highly trained scientists all looking for instruction. Officially, Horaki had won out over Lorenz, to a large extent because the former had the advantage of good relations with the nascent Ashcroft Foundation rather than because his version was better, but in practice the two, somewhat similar already, had syncretised in modern universities, the hybrid version taking on the traits of the school that Lorenz had devised. There still existed hard-school supporters of both, but the two were, fundamentally, similar. They were both devised from the older styles, but heavily modified by the systematic application of the scientific method to the old rites, flagging ones which failed or had unintended consequences, comparing those broken ones to ones which worked to find the elements that differed, and generally doing the same thing to sorcery that medicine had done to folk remedies.

But the final, and most esoteric of the methods, was the Salaamian School, named after Christopher Salaam, an early-twenty-first century archaeologist and linguistic theorist who had, if his story was to be believed, stumbled across the principles of sorcery from almost first principles, aided only by some clay tablets of unknown providence in the British Museum. Certainly, the Salaamian School had very little in common with any of the others; it treated sorcerous procedures as something more akin to pure information, a careful balance of mnemonics and exceedingly complex mental calculations that effectively programmed the effect into being. Although the theoretical basis was sound, and the effects that could be generated in it were typically more... elegant, in a mathematical sense, than those produced by other methods, the problem was that it was beyond the human intellect to perform anything but the most basic of procedures, which even then took far longer than any other method would have taken. Christopher Salaam had gone crazy at the end, become convinced that the entire universe was a localised bubble in a vast churning sea of infinite possibilities, and was fundamentally unstable, rebuilt afresh every time a sorcerous procedure was performed; that, literally, sorcery did not break the laws of physics, but instead shifted the practitioner into a point in phase-space where the initial conditions were such that the effects desired happen. The school was an almost purely theoretical one, due to its complexity and negative effects on practitioners' sanity. It was used to check the procedures of other schools, not actually performed.

And yet all the sorcerers upon the _Solomon Throne_ were all trained in the Salaamian School, and, indeed, the OSS made up the majroity of its practical users. The reason for this was simple. Despite the risks and the complexity, it was the only known human-codified system for practice of sorcery which had any capacity for building new procedures without extended experimentation; the only one which allowed true workings from first principles. And, unlike all other systems, the limit was in the rate at which the exceptionally complex n-dimensional calculations and lengthy mnemonic devices (themselves only abbreviated versions of other calculations; given results, so to speak) could be performed, given a sufficient flow of orgone.

The Trintignant-Patjug-003 cyberbrains, Achtzig-made implants that wrapped around their brains, coolant pipes flowing from the ceramic skull-replacement, were woven into the unmyelinated fibres that made up the cerebral cortex, and solved the issues of computation, linked as they were into the trio of Mobad supercomputers within the centre of the ship. And, as for the supplies of ruach, well...

Out in the real-ship, down in what, in the original design, would have been the chamber for an additional D-Engine, to power the ventral laser, but in the _Solomon Throne_ now housed a new power source, a team stood, all clad in full biohazard exosuits. They were clustered together in the middle of the hollow space, keeping far away from the Patrone capsules.

"We have authorisation for full use of the Patrone system," said Dr Childe, over the comms system of the suits. His tone was confident, veiling any nervousness he may have had. "Ready to authorise?"

Each individual Patrone was a cylinder, whitish-grey, with cables flowing from its side, slightly wider and about a head taller than a man's torso. They were wrapped, six to a level, around a central pole, from ceiling to floor. The room was filled with these poles, . There were hundreds in this room alone; there were more spaces such as this, in whatever room could have been found. A single green light blinked on each one; of course, in Augmented Reality, flowing entopics and projections gave the full status of each Patrone at just a glance. But the green light told all; that the Patrone was ready for use.

The lights flashed blue on the inside of Dr Childe's exosuit, as the other operators across the ship acknowledged him. He reached out, servos on the outside of the void-proofed exosuit humming, and made a complex gesture in the AR display that hung before him.

The results were rather prosaic, after all this melodrama.

One by one, cascading down from the ceiling, the lights on the Patrone cylinders flashed to yellow, and then to red, the flow through the pipes into them ceasing with the red light. It was over in a few seconds.

Inside the simulated space, where an infinite black void which hung above the infinite white plane, the effects were much more dramatic. The entire world began to warp, vast flowing ripples which pulsed through the floor, avoiding the sorcerous markings. In the sky above, novae flared, burning brightness which left harsh shadows scorched behind the standing figures of the sorcerers. They left a pattern in the sky, from where they have so briefly been; the dead stars creating a ritualised marker identical to the one down below, on the whiteness.

Back on the _Solomon Throne_, the lifesign monitors on the sorcerers began to scream, as the cyberbrains were pushed beyond their safe-operational limits, frying the organic tissue as the waste heat produced from their operations overcame the capacity of the coolant systems.

A plume of liquid shadow erupted from the plane, as the whiteness tore, split like a discarded skin. Vast and roiling, it spread out, a cloud of impossible darkness obtenerating the sorcerers and almost obfuscating the novae, already dying out. It was only possible to see by its absence, but it seemed to be coalescing into some kind of shape above them, up in the void, some vast sphere.

"ENE breach!" warned monitoring systems, back in the real world, sirens blazing throughout the ship. "Sever-soul compromised!"

"Yank them! Get the sorcerers out of there!" yelled Dr Childe. "Ignore the AN damage!"

Too late.

There was a moment of terrible movement, as the last of the novae died and the white plain ceased to be, consumed by the growing shadow.

All at once, all the other vital signs failed, the other sorcerers snuffed out in an instance like candles dropped in the ocean. The server-soul's host began to thrash and scream blasphemies, mad words pouring from her mouth in a roaring torrent, before the LAI systems engaged and triggered the containment protocols, flooding the room with plasma. There was no-one else left to order it. Everyone else on board, within the warding circles carved into the rocks around the ship, and which had been in the sever-soul, had dropped to the floor like puppets with their strings cut, minds and souls snuffed out in an instant.

Nevertheless, they had, in those last moments, succeeded.

It was done.

~'/|\'~

[START PACKAGE]

[The camera pans over the wreckage of the Reykjavik pseudo-arcology]

Antonio de Nebrija :"The fighting still rages in Reykjavik, the cultist forces of the Order of Dagon being slowly pushed back by fierce house-to-house fighting..."

[A soldier in Centurion powered armour blows down the door to a building with a single plasma cannon shot. A grenade is thrown in, then foot soldiers, clad in the heavy combat armour of the standard infantryman, head through in pairs, rifles raised]

ADN: "... and despite minor friendly losses, victory looks to be certain."

[The wreckage of an Esoteric Order of Dagon Leviathan-type mecha lies sprawled on the ground. The unit is blown clean in half at the waist. A Seraph Engel looms over it, bearing proud and regal. Notably, none of the organic components are showing; from this perspective, it could just be a very large conventional mecha]

ADN: "This is aided by the reports of the success in the diversionary assault to the north, which, contrary to even the most optimistic expectations, has actually succeeded in breaking through the lines..."

[A graphic displays an arrow, the green of unified humanity, punching through the blue of the Order forces over the urban area to the north as well as into the Reykjavik pseudo-arcology.]

ADN: "... no doubt aided by the fact that they have been assisted by the brand new Evangelion-class mecha, capital-grade units recently unveiled and seeing their first major deployment; one which has been exceptionally successful."

[Still pictures of Unit 02, in the old Type-C armour, from its public unveiling in Chicago-2, shortly before the attack by the Seventh Herald, Yam. Notably, it's still in the red of its test colours, rather than the camouflage scheme that it used when actually deployed, let alone the Type-D it is currently in]

ADN: "However, it is not enough to merely win the war. We must also win the peace."

[The camera moves to a dusk shot of a sealed camouflaged dome, made of memoform plastics; it's large, covering multiple clusters of buildings. The Atlantic oscean can be seen behind it; there are docking points, where A-Pod ships (not military troopships) hover. Large airlocks can be seen at the base, surrounded by military forces]

ADN: "Even though this is still an active war zone, the humanitarian effort to rescue the slave workers and victims in the Dagonite camps has already begun. The first, and most important thing, is to get the victims to a place of safety, and prevent their officially sanctioned killing by enemy forces, in an attempt to prevent their liberation."

[The shot changes to one inside the dome; it's well lit, with strips of light running along the curved ceiling. Multi-story tent-like structures have been set up, packed very tight, connected together.]

ADN: "Once rescued..."

[NEG soldiers, notably not wearing the standard combat helmet, but instead a less armoured variant which covers the face with a nanofactory diamond transparent front, removing the inhumanity of the standard, skull-like appearance, can be seen, waving columns of people in cheap-looking, undyed clothing along. The hair of the rescued people has been shaved off, leaving only a stubble. The clothing is obviously far too cold to survive for long outside in the temperatures in Iceland at this time of year]

ADN: "... and the obvious Dagonite infiltrators removed..."

[More NEG soldiers, a Crusader powered armour standing next to them, HMG in hand, have hand-held metal detectors and stun batons, scanning the people at a checkpoint for weapons, before herding them into another, larger scanner. One person is pulled out of the crowd, and bundled to the ground, before being clubbed into unconsciousness with stun-batons.]

ADN: "... then the humanitarian work can begin. These poor people have been through so much."

[The camera jumps from tear-stained face to tear-stained face]

ADN: "Those liberated from the work camps have been used as slave labour, given the bare minimum of food. Some cannot be saved; the... well, the evil, there's no other word, really, of the Order is such that it lobotomises them, making them into nothing more than fleshy automata to use as workers. Others were pumped full of combat drugs when the NEG assault was detected, and set loose into our path, mindlessly killing anything that got in their way. Only those who were in tasks which required some intelligence..."

[Images of the things described above. The blankness in the eyes of the lobotomised workers, sitting like cattle in the pens that the Order kept them in, not even moving when the powered armour claws off the locks, is more disturbing than the madman with a knife being gunned down by infantry]

ADN: "... can be saved. And as for the people in the forced breeding camps, almost exclusively women, to the trauma of their repeated rape by the bestial Deep Ones, and highly transformed Hybrids, can be added the effects of the hallucinogenic and euphoric drugs used to keep them docile. Perhaps worse is the way that the highly addictive drugs are withdrawn during any pregnancy that results, all in a too-often-successful at brainwashing and thought control."

[Still shots of the living conditions in the rape camps. They are spartan, rather than the squalor of the work camps, with a slightly medicinal appearance to them; only slightly, because the pictures on the walls are disturbing in the extreme, to the extent that the autocensor blocks them out.]

[A woman of Asian decent, face puffy, eyes red-rimmed, a badly healed scar just under the barcode emblazoned on her forehead, appears on camera. The LAI automatically subtitles her dialogue. She begins talking in one of the Malay languages.]

SUBTITLES: "You're getting me out of here, please! I'm begging you, tell me you're getting me out of here!"

[She begins to shake]

SUBTITLES: "They... oh.... oh... they..."

[She bursts into tears.]

[The camera focusses on Antonio de Nebrija, he's standing on top of one of the multi-story prefabricated structures established in the NEG holding centre. He's wearing the light armour that is issued to journalists, the red "PRESS" emblem clearly obvious, with the same, PR-friendly helmet that the soldiers here were wearing.]

ADN: "I'm here inside one of the many rescue centres that the NEG forces have set up, as we advance across the formerly-Order controlled island. They contain top of the line medical facilities, including access to arcanotherapy, to treat injuries and malnourishment, as well as to counteract exposure to biological, chemical, nanological and micrological agents. This way, the rescued prisoners can be stabalised, before they are loaded onto ships, to get them to safe, NEG-controlled territory."

[The camera pans sideways, to show a male Nazzadi in a white biohazard suit, anti-stab plating evident on the chest, marking him as part of one of the Army Medical Corps. From behind the clear faceplate, he looks old enough to be a first generation, who possibly even fought in the First Arcanotech War. The camera LAI tags him as "Deputy Assistant Director of Medical Services, Dr Rera]

ADN: "So, doctor. Exposure to battlefield bee-cee-nam? That sounds unpleasant."

[The doctor nods]

Rera: "It's true, it is unpleasant. Control of the modern battlefield requires the use of emfog, a cloud of nano-and-microparticles which interfere with most kinds of communication, and, sadly, it is toxic when breathed in in large amounts. Luckily, with proper medical care and the use of counter-agents, it can be neutralised."

ADN: "And the biological and chemical weapons?"

[The doctor shakes his head.]

Rera: "Let me be clear. It has long been a policy of the New Earth Government that we do not use biological weapons that could infect any non-Tainted member of the four recognised _Homo sapiens_ subspecies. The risk of military grade bioweapons infecting real people would be too great. And on the subject of chemical weapons, likewise, I can guarantee that the only weapons used by the NEGA or NEGN here have been designed to be less-than-lethal to the purebred _Homo sapiens_ subspecies. So, yes, we do have to remedy the effects of knockout gas on many of the victims here, but if it's a choice between letting the Dagonites kill them, or knocking the entire work camp out, I know which one I'd chose."

[Antonio nods to the doctor's explanation.]

ADN: "I see. But..."

Rera: "That's not what I really want to talk about, though. The important thing is the good we're doing here. Once the Hybrid infiltrators have been weeded out... it's the matter of a simple gene check, the markers are unmistakable if you know what you're looking for, we tag each of the rescued people, ready to get them off this island. Already, we're setting up proper settlement camps back in friendly territory. Hopefully, one day we'll be able to set up proper housing here again, but for now, Iceland will be a military territory.

[He pauses]

Rera: It's probably for the best, considering how close we are to Migou territory.

ADN: "So... this entire structure... it's the size of an arcology dome..."

Rera: "Well, a slightly-smaller-than average one, to be accurate."

ADN: "Yes, okay, true. But, still. This entire thing, you've set it up in hours, and from the flow of people..."

[The camera pans down, to show the column being herded along the temporary streets, shaven-headed figures in loose, undyed clothing, like that might which be given by a hospital, shuffling along. The NEG guards around them have their stun-batons drawn, and are carrying riot shields.]

ADN: "... it's already well under way in its task. How do you manage it so quickly?"

Rera: "That has to go down to the bravery and efficiency of the men I have the honour of serving with... the soldiers who freed these people, the engineers who set this place up, and my fellow doctors and medics who are working non-stop to get these people processed, ready for evacuation."

[The camera pans again, so Antonio is the only one in shot.]

ADN: "So, there we have it. A sight into one of the areas of the Aeon War which we hear less about, and which many people would like to pretend doesn't exist. But we can all sleep better, and feel better about ourselves, in the knowledge that Operation CATO, with its aim to stop the Dagonites from doing things like this, has succeeded. This is Antonio de Nebrija, for WBO News."

[END PACKAGE]

Antonio stretched, straightish his arms and swinging them around. "How was it, Var?"

"Looking good." The Nazzadi paused. "We're going to have to do a redub on some of the earlier packages, though. The fact that we got moved to a processing centre, rather than a rape camp, means that the narrative's a bit mucked up."

"Are you done with me, though?" asked Rera, his dark face suddenly much more haggard-looking.

"Should be," answered Antonio. "If we need a reshoot, we'll find you if you're free, or someone else if you're not."

"Okay," said the elder Nazzadi. "Uh... when do you think it'll be going out? The bit with me in?"

"Want to tell someone to watch it live?" said Varuta, looking up from his PCPU with a wicked grin, pupils lit up as if with firelight from the AR images up against the soft contact layered over his eye.

Rera shuddered slightly, then nodded. "Yes, actually. Wife, and, who knows? Maybe my daughter might be able to take a break from her holiday... at my expense... to see what her dad actually does. If she isn't too busy staring at pictures of mecha online, all the time, even when I try to do something with her," he added, a sour note in his voice.

"Teenager?" asked Varuta, a sympathetic tone in his voice.

"Yes. You have one of the wonders known as teenage daughters?"

"One. Adopted. She can be like that, yeah. Nice most of the time, but sometimes she treats Pesa and me like we're only there as sources of money." The Nazzadi smiled, slightly indulgently.

"I wouldn't mind that so much, if she'd just be nicer to my... no. I am not going to complain about her like this." He thought about it for a moment. "I am not going to complain about her _more_, like this." Rera paused. "So, uh, when is it going to be shown?"

Varuta shrugged. "Antonio?"

"Two or three days from now, but as live. They don't show this kind of thing 'live'," the man said, not looking up, and making the inverted commas with one finger, as he ran over the notes on his PCPU, "until they're sure that they've won. Remember Juneau?"

"You mean..."

"Yeah."

Just then, an AR message, bright red against the inside of the transparent faceplate of the biohazard suit, flashed up. Rera glanced down. His face fell. "_Harangy_," he muttered to himself.

"What is it? Anything important?" asked Antonio, his journalistic instincts tingling.

"Important, yes," answered the doctor, bruskly. "Something you can cover, no."

"Why, what do you mean?" the human asked, jogging to catch up with the Nazzadi doctor, who had already headed off down the staircase at the side of the temperature building. "We're here to get the story, get some human interest, maybe."

"You don't want this kind of interest, human."

"Why not? We're here for the truth."

He almost ran into the elder man, red eyes staring through the faceplate with what seemed to be concrete hate, chisel-like teeth evident through parted lips. "_Ua mandaterma ni infera_," hissed the older man. Varuta blanched slightly at those words. "You idiotic human moron... you have no idea what it's really like dealing with these people. What they go through and even once we've got them out, the withdrawal symptoms they suffer. You think there's a _harangy_ reason we're all in full gear, and the soldiers have stun-sticks and riot shields, huh? Some of them are so broken we'll never really be able to put them back together again, and then you prattle about "liberation" and "saving them". You have _no_ idea what I'm going to, do you? Do you?"

Neither of the journalists said anything.

"It's a five-four-fifty-five. That means that some of the captives have had slow-release drugs that induce symptoms akin to paranoid schizophrenia injected before we got to them, and had non-metallic knives hidden on them. They're normally fully symptomatic before they find the knives, if they do at all. Sometimes they just attack the others with their bare hands and teeth."

He glared at them.

"Do you know what it's like working in an environment where it's so common that we have a _standardised code_ for it?"

The doctor stormed off.

~'/|\'~

High above the surface of the third planet in the ǶǡѬѮӜ-[(zero-46,656) and (thirtyone-1296) and (eleven-36) and (thirtyfive)]-[(zero-60,466,176) and (one-1,679,616) and (twentynine-46,656) and (seven-1296) and (seventeen-36) and (three)] system, the Migou Hive Ship hung, its bulk minuscule compared to the oversized moon of this world, but still enough to make it a new morning star to the inhabitants.

The term "Hive Ship" was eminently inaccurate. The correct term could not have been pronounced by an ape-descendent which lacked almost all the necessary organ systems, and could not see into the majority of the needed bands of the electromagnetic spectrum, but a much simplified version might have translated better as [Exclusion Volume] [Containment and Defence] Planetoid, or EVCDP. This basic design saw use all around the galaxy, on those occasions when it was necessary to lock down an entire solar system, to contain the things of long forgotten species and the remnants of those who had attempted to transcend their then-status that littered such places.

The Migou, to use just-plain-wrong term (the abominable snowman of Tibetan myth was an entirely different species, often encountered in the forces of the Unnameable One), were not even a single species, not any more. Yes, the local branch, the void-adapted fungiod insect-like creatures, spread over this arm of the Milky Way, were all closely related, though they had speciated and divided as the gap between star systems and the slow speed of light, when the immensity of space was considered, had imposed a barrier. But as you spread out, they got more and more different, and, moreover, there were creatures from other trees of life, all following the same goal; the containment of the sleeping and dead elder monstrosities which could wipe them all out. The Migou were no longer a species. They were a philosophy; a galaxy-wide loose alliance of those who recognised that there were things in the universe which could wipe them all out. And their knowledge diffused out, to aid in the pursuit of their eternal vigil, for the failure of one could threaten all the ones in the local area. They were not so much an empire as they were a network, watching over those spatially close to them, to ensure that they had not been corrupted, while providing aid to the unsafe systems.

And the native species, Species ᵺᶙӎшѧ... they were dangerous. The entire planet was irrevocably contaminated just by its nature; it was the reason that the highest level of Exclusion Volume had been established around it. It was the reason that asteroid belts from local stars had been mined to near worthlessness, rather than risk disturbing things in this system by taking too many resources, just to build the masses of EVCDPs that clustered around all the direct paths from other stars, searching for torch-flares or the odd rifts that the Tsab used in their discontinuous jumps, to destroy anything that tried to breach the volume.

The humans below thought that the Migou could have at most two EVCDPs, two Hive Ships. They were blind. There had been attempts, true, to move a second EVCDP to the third planet, almost exactly [(one-36ths)] of a Yuggothian cycle ago, but lased warnings about a Tsabian breakthrough close to the system had forced its recall. It had been all that could be spared, from the necessity of maintaining the [Exclusion Volume], proof against lesser species and stopping any of the quarantined lifeforms from getting out.

And the last [(ten-36ths)] of a Yuggothian cycle, their central base in this system, had been a period of first concern, then worry, then annoyance, and now terror. So fast. So unpredictable. In some ways, such as recklessness and blind-stupidity, this species put even the Tsab to shame. Communications from systems closer to the lines, the light-speed signals crawling through space like a slow fuse, indicated that that Tsab were slowly becoming more aware of the dangers, of the reason for the existence of the Migou, taking more care when they managed to break an [Exclusion Volume] or find one that the local Migou had not discovered. That was a mixed blessing, of course, as it meant that they were less likely to be consumed by the inhabitants before they could obtain the truly dangerous things, but it was better, if only marginally, that they did not wake that they should not.

And it was on the subject of things that should be not woken that this emergency meeting had been called. This EVCDP, as with all its kind, a warship, smothered in layers of ablative ice, which also served as reaction mass and camouflage, and reinforced along the line of its thrust axis, to take the almost-impossible forces generated by its engines, needed to move an object of its mass at an anywhere near passable acceleration. There simply was not the engineering tolerances to have the vast caverns or tall spires of Yuggoth, and so the planetoid was an almost sold mass of metal, Migou construction material, and other, stranger substances bought from beyond the stars. This was irrelevant, though, for only one of the individuals at this meeting was actually in the room in person, the others merely present in one of multiple [body-form/indiviudals], blank communication bodies remotely controlled. And that was not to mention the sensory feeds that ran from this room all around the EVCDP, and via the lightspeed communicators to the rest of the fleet around Three, and (for archival purposes) out to the rely stations that would lead to Yuggoth itself. The Migou did not delineate cleanly between themselves and their technology, and any one of the void-adapted fungoids within range could view this, their superior intellect allowing them to multitask in this way, even when they were operating multiple body-forms. In a sense, the six involved in this conversation were not there as individuals. They were there as representatives of positions, in the vast network of webs and connections that was how the Migou made decisions; merely as ones among the most respected of their respective positions and through their own merit.

Some humans believed that the Migou were a hive-minded species. They were wrong. But in some ways, they had built themselves one, through technology and sorcery, not through some pathetic _innate_ parapsychic ability; a vast network of communications and debate from which emergent policies evolved.

Some might even call it a cyberdemocracy.

Their conversation could not have been understood by a human. Quite apart from the fact that the Migou language, despite the best attempts of linguists, remained untranslated, the levels of reference, the cultural context, the vibrations and colour changes that the information took; all of this was outside the ability of a human to understand, even if they had the necessary implants to understand the flow of easily accessible information that any of the participants or onlookers would have access to with but a thought, to understand the morass of precedent, previous cases, and predicted data. But the basic nature was less alien than might be thought, with the obfuscation of linguistics stripped away. That the chamber would have appeared dark and slime-covered to a human merely showed their inferiority; unable to see the frequencies which void-adapted Migou saw in, or recognise that the maintenance fluid was entirely sterile and aided in the repair and stability of the ship; likewise, everything the Migou did had a point.

There was a buzzing and vibration from the one Migou exclusively present, their [self-form] only occupying a single [body-form/individual].

Secretary of Known Recordings : This [meeting/assemblage] is now [full/complete]. It is [requested/ordered] that all [body-forms/networks] act as is properly becoming.

The buzzing from the rest of the room ceased to a rhythmic hum, from the unconscious twitching of limbs.

Secretary K. R. : This [self-form/individual] is [grateful/glad]. It is now [necessary/mandated] that the [emergency/situation] on Three be discussed. This [meeting/assemblage] calls upon the Coordinator of Deployed Containment Forces to provide [clarification/explanation] for why it has issued a [full/total] deployment of a full [(five-36ths)] of our strategic reserves.

Assistant to the Void-Forces: This [body-form/individual] wishes to [interrupt/expand].

Secretary K. R. : This [self-form/individual] permits such an [interruption/expansion], though with [slight/marginal] annoyance.

Assistant V.-F. : This [body-form/individual] is grateful for permission, and [believes/assures] that this is directly [relevant/connected] to the subject at [appendage/manipulator]. The Coordinator of Deployed Containment Forces has [authorised/forced] [(two)] of our [General Out-System] [Local Supremacy Craft] into the atmosphere of Three, to [join/accompany] the deployment of the . This [self-form/individual] would like to remind this [meeting/assemblage] that we only have [(twelve)] available around Three, due to the needs of the Containment of the rest of the ǶǡѬѮӜ-[(zero-46,656) and (thirtyone-1296) and (eleven-36) and (thirtyfive)]-[(zero-60,466,176) and (one-1,679,616) and (twentynine-46,656) and (seven-1296) and (seventeen-36) and (three)] system. The needs of Containment [mandate/demand] that we [quarantine/isolate] all the in-system objects Species ᵺᶙӎшѧ has tried to [inhabit/colonise], even after they have been [cleansed/purged] of Species ᵺᶙӎшѧ.

Secretary K. R. : This [self-form/individual] was aware of such [information/data], Assistant to the Void-Forces, and was proceeding in an [orderly/stable] manner.

Assistant V.-F. : This [body-form/individual] apologises. It is merely that it was [thought/believed] that such a detail should be [raised/informed] as fast as possible.

Secretary K. R. : This [self-form/individual] believes it would go faster if certain [self-forms/individuals] did not [interrupt/interject].

The Secretary twitched its wings, resettling them in what, to a human, would be akin to clearing their throat.

Secretary K. R. : This [self-form/individual] asks the Coordinator of Deployed Containment Forces to provide [explanation/clarification] for its actions.

Coordinator of Deployed Containment Forces : This [body-form/individual] thanks the Secretary of Known Recordings, and condones the [wonderful/brilliant] enthusiasm of the Assistant to the Void-Forces to raise its points as [rapidly/swiftly] as it could. Furthermore, this [self-form/individual] assures the [meeting/assemblage] that it retains full [grasp/embrace] of its sanity. However, to [explain/clarify], it must call upon Student Into Things Unknown, for it [made/gave] the orders on the [explanation/clarification] of that [self-form/individual].

Secretary K. R. : This [self-form/individual] would query if the Student Into Things Unknown provided its backing, as [detailed/described] by the Coordinator of Deployed Containment Forces.

One of the other communication bodies vibrated, spreading its wings wide. Even from the communications body, it could be seen, from the cybernetics that snaked into the body, that the Student Into Things Unknown could not bear to lack the massively enhanced interface capacities, even for a short meeting in a [body-form/individual], that it would normally possess in its laboratory environment. How typical for one who filled a role such as it.

Student Into Things Unknown: Indeed, this [body-form/individual] and its [self-form/individual] gave full backing to the Coordinator of Deployed Containment Forces, after [consulting/debating] with the Prophet of Estimated Futures and the Archivist of Dangerous Pasts.

The Assistant to the Void-Forces let out an annoyed buzz, a pulse of its surface rippling through the mid ultraviolet, before it regained control of itself. With such a block behind it, the Coordinator of Deployed Containment Forces was probably untouchable, even if it had forced the stupidity of pulling down [General Out-System] [Local Supremacy Craft] into atmosphere, where they were not really designed to go. The Student Into Things Unknown ignored the outburst, such as it was, and continued.

Student I. T. U. : Our [(three)] [self-forms/individuals] have analysed the [data/readings], executed the predicative [procedures/sorceries], and consulted with the [Sanctified/parapsychics]. It is [clear/certain]. In [retrospect/hindsight], we should have seen it earlier.

Prophet of Estimated Futures : This [body-form/individual] apologies most profusely for its failure to [anticipate/foresee] such an event. It was too preoccupied with the [possibility/potential-probability] of another light-speed [break/rupture] and the resulting dimensional [instability/flaw], such as happened in the [(eighth)] and [(ninth)] time increments.

Secretary K. R. : This [self-form/individual] would ask precisely what event its [esteemed/respected] colleagues are referring to, and [request/ask] that they get in close proximity to the point.

Student I. T. U : This [body-form/individual] would request that it not be [interrupted/interjected], when it is trying to explain. As the Secretary of Known Recordings has [noted/raised] on previous occasions.

It paused.

Student I. T. U : Naturally, the Prophet of Estimated Futures and the Archivist of Dangerous Pasts are welcome, to [explain/clarify] on points in their own [expertise/base].

Archivist of Dangerous Pasts : This [body-form/individual] would like to say that this last [(ten-36ths)] of a Yuggothian cycle has been without [precedent/predecessors] in the Containment of this Volume. It is the opinion-from-evidence of this [self-form/individual] that the upcoming {CELESTIAL CONJUNCTION} has caused a massive rise in activity of the {THREATS}.

The last of the Migou in the room spoke then. It had a much darker epidermis than the others, which almost sucked at the light.

Handler of Xenobiological Lifeforms : With respect to the Archivist of Dangerous Pasts, this [self-form/individual] does not believe-with-evidence that that can be the sole [reason/explanation]. An increase in root atavistic [traits/tendencies] of the order of [(sixteen-1,679,616)] has been noted among the [inhabitants/dwellers] of the dominant social [organisation/grouping] of Species ᵺᶙӎшѧ. This [self-form/individual] is of the opinion that Species ᵺᶙӎшѧ is [undergoing/experiencing] typical [spontaneous/unprovoked] differentiation. For this reason, this [self-form/individual] supports the Assistant to the Void-Forces. If Species ᵺᶙӎшѧ undergoes the full degeneration, it will be [necessary/mandatory] to have total orbital [supremacy/control], to prevent the contamination of the rest of this system.

Archivist D. P. : This [body-form/individual] would request that the Handler of Xenobiological Lifeforms not promote its [sanity-lacking/crazy] assertion-hypothesises in this [meeting/assemblage]. Species ᵺᶙӎшѧ only fulfils [(eleven)] out of the [(thirteen-36) and (nineteen)] criteria associated with [spontaneous/unprovoked] differentiation. The idea of the Handler of Xenobiological Lifeforms has been considered, and been found [wanting/lacking].

There was a loud, furious-sounding buzzing from the Secretary of Known Recordings.

Secretary K. R. : Not relevant! This [body-form/individual] would like to know why deployment of a full [(five-36ths)] of our strategic reserves has been [authorised/enforced]!

The Coordinator of Deployed Containment Forces spoke quickly.

Coordinator D. C. F. : The [sensor/detection] systems on board on this [Exclusion Volume] [Containment and Defence] Planetoid, confirmed by the [Long Range Sensor Vessels], detected a [massive/huge] flow of {UNTRANSLATABLE}, in Hex [(zero-1,679,616) and (nine-46,656) and (seventeen-1296) and (thirty five-36) and (zero)]. [Satellite/orbital] coverage shows that a major [offensive/attack] was launched by [New Earth Government] forces against the cultists of {HIGH PRIEST}. The [New Earth Government] has [compromised/weakened] its position against {CONTAINMENT} in order to do so.

Secretary K. R. : This [self-form/individual] believes-with-evidence that it is more [evidence/clues] that they are desperate. At least they [acknowledge/recognise] the threat posed by forces loyal to {HIGH PRIEST}.

Coordinator D. C. F. : This [body-form/individual] is sure that what they are doing is [illogical/stupid], if it is being done for [territorial/military] reasons. The military gains are not of that [value/worth]. They are up to some [plan/plot].

Archivist D. P. : This [body-form/individual] would like to add that the signature of {UNTRANSLATABLE} is unprecedented in over [(two-46,656) and (zero-1296) and (thirtyone-36) and (twentynine)] Yuggothian cycles. Either an exceptionally powerful {THREAT} is [awaking/living], or multiple such beings are involved. It is believed-with-evidence that it is the [former/first] is the case, and the {SLEEPER IN FIRE} is being intentionally being [summoned/roused].

The Assistant to the Void-Forces was silent, shocked to its core by the news. Finally, it managed to speak.

Assistant V.-F. : This [self-form/individu... this [body-form/individual] expresses great concern. Are the Student Into Things Unknown and the Archivist of Dangerous Pasts sure of this?

Prophet E. F. : This [body-form/individual] is, and once again expresses [remorse/sorrow] that it did not foresee or predict this.

Archivist D. P. : Likewise, this [body-form/individual] is certain, to a high [extent/level].

Assistant V.-F. : With such information, this [body-form/individual] withdraws all objection to the deployment.

The Archivist of Dangerous Pasts rippled its wings in satisfaction. The Assistant to the Void-Forces continued, though.

Assistant V.-F. : This [body-form/individual] also now believes-with-evidence that more [void/space] forces should be [committed/deployed]. This threat should never be [underestimated/ignored]. Indeed, this [body-form/individual] believes-with-evidence that the entire [hex/sector] should be [sterilised/cleansed] from orbit. It believes-with-evidence that such a [technique/method] would be the only way to be [certain/sure].

Handler X. L. : This [body-form/individual] expresses [shock/alarm] at such a suggestion. The {SLEEPER IN FIRE} could be woken by such a [technique/method], and there are other {THREATS} on Three.

Coordinator D. C. P. : This [body-form/individual] is of the opinion that, although the suggestion of the Assistant to the Void-Forces should not be [implemented/performed] immediately, we must be ready.

Archivist D. P : This [body-form/individual] agrees with the Coordinator of Deployed Containment Forces. It is better to risk an [uncertain/unfixed] awakening of a {THREAT} to contain another, than to [let/permit] one [certain/fixed] awakening {THREAT}.

Prophet E. F. : From initial calculations, this [body-form/individual] believes-with-evidence, that, should orbital [sterilisation/cleansing] be needed, the chance of another{THREAT} [awakening/living] is [(thirteen-36ths)]. Yet it will prove necessary to risk it, to prevent the {SLEEPER IN FIRE} [awakening/living] again.

Archivist D. P : This [body-form/individual] would remind this [meeting/assemblage] of the events last time it [awoke/lived]. It must be risked.

There was silence, as the terrible future that lay before them. Finally, the Secretary of Known Recordings spoke again, its buzzings and colour changes weak and muted, in a way which, in a human, would have seemed like desperate hope.

Secretary K. R. : At least, this [self-form/individual] reminds the [meeting/assemblage] that the [New Earth Government] will try to oppose it. They have an [unnatural/unusual] skill at such things.

The buzzing of the Coordinator of Deployed Containment Forces was burning cold, its mottling shifting to the far ultraviolet.

Coordinator D. C. F. : This [body-form/individual] would remind the [meeting/assemblage] of what happened last time [containment/cleansing] was attempted on a {THREAT}. In the [(sixth)] time increment? [(Two)] entire [fleets/wings] of [Terrestrial Planet Combat] [Local Supremacy Craft] (Non-Standard) were destroyed. [(One)] by a close-proximity [fused-hydrogen/atomic] weapon, while actively in [combat/conflict] with the {BLACK FRACTAL}, the other by an [orbital/void-born] assault while [trying/attempting] to reinforce the aim of [containment/cleansing].

Assistant V.-F. : This [body-form/individual] would like to correct the Coordinator of Deployed Containment Forces. It was [technically/precisely] launched from the [upper/higher] atmosphere, and thus was not under the [jurisdiction/control] of the [void/space] forces.

Coordinator D. C. F. : This [body-form/individual] would like to say that that was not the [point/message]. The [point/message] was that Species ᵺᶙӎшѧ cannot be trusted to deal with {THREATS}, even if they [possess/own] the technical capability.

Secretary K. R. : This [self-form/individual] would argue that, if they have the [capacity/abilities] to deal with {THREATS}, then it is possible to [protect/preserve] our strategic reserves.

The humming of the Archivist of Dangerous Pasts was slow, methodical, and ancient. It was the eldest of its kind here, having soaked up the lore that the species that made up the Migou had accumulated, crawling between the stars at light-speed as it was sent, for aeons. The line between the Migou and their technology was thin at best; the Archivist of Dangerous Pasts was far beyond it, more like a distributed mind in the networks, teleoperating body-forms than anything akin to how it had once been. And the way it broke protocol to say this showed its concern.

Archivist D. P. : It cannot be risked. The behaviour of the [New Earth Government] matches several other [cases/instances] where the {NATIVE SPECIES} was compromised by [cultists/worshippers] of {THREATS}. It is suspected-by-precedent that they are trying to [summon/call] the {SLEEPER IN FIRE} themselves. Such behaviour would indicate that Species ᵺᶙӎшѧ is completely [hostile/servile]. It may be necessary to [move/transition] to the [sterilisation/eradication] of Species ᵺᶙӎшѧ, should this be the [case/situation].

~'/|\'~

An explosion thudded far overhead, deep and sonorous, which shook the bones. The lights flickered, making shadows dance, the dust on the floors danced. Babies wailed like air-raid sirens and small children bawled, the frantic attempts of the outnumbered carers to keep them quiet unsuccessful. The air was already growing thick with the musk of the scared members of the Elect, and the wetter, somewhat necrotic scent of the Blooded.

Things were quieter, but even more stressful in the militia command post in this bunker. A mix of bureaucrats and factory supervisors, Blooded and Elect alike, were all that were here. There were no members of the proper armed forces of the Esoteric Order of Dagon left alive here, nor any of the true Chosen.

"Right, my fellow _qr'rcbar'uloevq-uhzna_, and _r'yrpg-uhzna_, what do we know?" said Khonatqa Smeef'ubabhe, who was technically the local _Veer'thyne'yrnq-re_, running a hand through her fast-thinning hair. By right of Blood, she was the highest ranking member of the militia here, and that was not comforting. _Va Dagon-anzr_, she was the superior supervisor of the production from the _Bu-shp'x_ District, not a military commander. The _Veer'thyne_ militia was only meant to be subordinate to the proper military, not to carry out operations on its own, _va Dagon-anzr_!

As a result, she was just going to fall back to what she knew, and get a clear overview of their assets, after they'd been forced to fall back here, collapsing the tunnels down on their way. It would take the blasphemers of the New Earth Government considerable effort to follow them down here, as the corridors had been built to be too small for powered armour, meaning that they'd have to find dig a way through the corridors on foot. Their own powered armour, manned by the last members of the proper military they'd had with them, had given their lives at the entrance, unable to retreat further, but able to buy time and dig in.

Not much time, since the NEG had simply pulled back their own powered armour, and called in those _en'cvat_ wasp-like gunships, who'd simply cut the poor faithful to pieces with pin-point accurate laser fire and charge beam shots, their slaved LAI drones more than enough to see through any attempt at cover, but time enough.

The member of the Blooded who'd defaulted to her second-in-command, Ubeevoyr Q'b'p-gbe-ubabhe (in his normal life... or at least the life he'd had until the monsters in the NEG had come... a medical doctor who saw to the _ha'snvgu'shy-uhzna_), blinked his oversized, watery eyes, the pupils no-longer human, and said, "Well, um, we've still got contact with most of the other _f'n-s'rgl_ bunkers... they're in a similar state to us. There are some members of the military in some of them, but from what I've been able to pick up, they're arguing with each other. Some want to attack, some have just broken like _ul'qebcu-bovp s'vfu_." The last words were spat in the invective tone. These discussions were being conducting in the hybrid tongue spoken by the human and near-human inhabitants, rather than true Ry'lehan, simply because there were not enough present who could speak the proper language with any degree of faculty.

"I know they're a bunch of _ul'qebcu-bovp s'vfu_," said Khontaqa, using a studiously neutral tone, "but we can't do anything. We collapsed the tunnels behind us."

"Um... _ubabherq Veer'thyne'yrnq-re_!" called out one of the operators, sat by one of the stations that connected to the fibre-optic network in this cramped room, "we've... well, networks are dropping off the station. We've lost _Q'rnqs'vfu_, _Er-cyvp'nc'jarqh_... I can go on."

"They've gone dark?" asked Ubeevoyr, answering for his superior.

The woman at the desk, barely sixteen and not really much more a girl, shook her head. "No. They're still broadcasting... but," she winced, "well. Uh, listen."

She made a few changes at her desk, the computer (a bulky desktop, seventy years behind the technology curve) humming near silently as she plugged moved cables around. Something began to play, in the strict, precise Reformed English of the New Earth Government. It was a female voice, cold and clinical, and dripping with contempt.

"We now return,  
Deep Ones will learn,  
New kinds of fear,  
While we are here."

There was a pause. Then the voice spoke again, in some alien language, but this time there was a wicked glee in the words.

"_Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam._"

Another pause. It began to loop, starting again.

"We now return,  
Deep Ones..."

"Cut it off!" snapped Khonatqa, her voice little more intelligible than a gurgle. The operator obliged.

"_Va Dagon-anzr_, they've got to the tunnels, then. They weren't meant to find them," she said, managing to hold the whine out of her voice. That estimate had always, in retrospect, been too optimistic. When they were meant to be able to lob a missile through a window to hit an unauthorised radio broadcast, of course they'd find the tunnels. She wiped one clammy hand over her forehead, melanin now blending with the emergence of the various pigments that the Chosen used, and slumped down in her chair. "Right!" she snapped, sitting bolt upright. "Have the remaining _Veer'thyne_ got everything from the military stockpile here?"

Ubeevoyr nodded. "Yes. It's meant to be saved for the army, though, not the _Veer'thyne_," he said, a note of reprimand in his voice.

"Yes," she snapped back, rolling her fish-like eyes in their still-human sockets. "Because they're being really helpful, aren't they?" She paused, as another explosion shook the ceiling and made the lights flicker. "If they want them, they can come and get them. Until then, I'm going to see that they're used."

The man lowered his gaze. "Sarcasm," he muttered. "Yes, that's useful, isn't it? Just when I try to note that you're not..."

"Ubeevoyr."

"Yes?"

"Shut up, Ubeevoyr." She drummed a pair of fingers against her teeth, drawing them back with a yelp when she nicked one against the shark-like teeth which had replaced her human ones, coming in from under the gums.

Ubeevoyr snickered, until a glance silenced him.

"Can we concentrate, please? Of the surviving members of the _Veer'thyne_, we have 29 ready, yes?" The question was directed at one of the human lesser members of the militia, who had been standing silently in the room. The man shook his head.

"I am afraid not, _ubabherq Veer'thyne'yrnq-re_," he said, saluting sloppily. "According to the doctors... uh, we got some of the carers to help up, as they have medical training, I hope that's okay?" he asked, waiting for confirmation. When he received it, he continued. "Yes. Um, we have only twelve of the _Veer'thyne_ who are completely uninjured; five can walk, and six are too injured to do anything. The rest have died, or didn't make it down before we collapsed the tunnels." The man flinched slightly, then added, "_Va zl bja vasre'vbev'gl, z'lfrys znl unir b'ssraqrq lbh, fhcrev'be bar_," in ritualised apology for the correction.

She waved a webbed hand at him. "Fine." She took in a gulping breath, air dragged over her gills as well as into her lungs. "Only six _p'bzongc-nve_ of uninjured," she groaned. "How are the five?"

"We've doped them up on painkillers. They can walk, but they won't be aiming for _hevar_... uh sorry, _ubabherq Veer'thyne'yrnq-re_."

Ubeevoyr stared into her eyes. "Not enough. I could see what you were planning. The blasphemers hold the waterfront. We couldn't even get that close. And it would be foolish to try. We should just stay here, and hold the entrances."

The communications operator who'd spoken earlier interrupted, her voice shaking with both nervousness at doing this, and the terror of hearing those messages take over even more of the bunkers. "Uh, _ubabherq Veer'thyne'yrnq-re_, I think that's how they're getting into the tunnels. They're getting in through the evac points at the waterfront. And... well, they seem to be using," he voice dipped, "I know it sounds impossible..."

"Just tell me, _r'yrpg-uhzna_," snapped Khonatqa.

"Summoned _haan'zrn-oyr'puvyqera_," the woman burst out. "Invisible monsters with glowing eyes that disembowel and kill and rape and paint the walls in blood. That sounds like the _haan'zrn-oyr'puvyqera_ of the Unnameable One. Do you understand, _Veer'thyne'yrnq-re_," she suddenly shouted, almost screeching as she left out the honorific. "I can hear it all over the network. There isn't any warning; they just start screaming, and there's this noise and a few babbled descriptions, and then the line goes silent. And then that chant starts again." There were tears running down her cheeks, smudging the make-up that must have remained from the parties only the night before (so long ago), as she said, "Do you know what it's like listening to that _over_ and _over_ again?"

Khonatqa stared at the sobbing woman for several long seconds. Then, "Get to the armoury. Get yourself kitted up. You can't cope with the radio any more. Fine. Get ready to fight." She turned to Ubeevoyr. "Get me a full list of every person of age... no," she corrected herself, "get me a list of everyone in this bunker."

"What are you doing?" Ubeevoyr asked, straightening up, as he realised what she was doing. "You can't just do this. They're here to be protected." Inhuman instincts flared in both of them; he was flexing for a dominance challenge. They were both, unconsciously, heating up, faces flushing with blood as their body temperatures rose for the activity that their nascent Deep One forms foresaw.

She thwarted it by the expedient method of, in one smooth motion, drawing her pistol and placing it against his forehead. She could see, in her developing infra-red vision, all the heat drain away from his face.

"_Va Dagon'anzr_, you are not going to do anything stupid, are you?" she said, coldly. "I want you alive, but I _need_ you to do what I say. Drop the pistol you're trying to draw if you think you can do that."

There was a clatter. Only then did she see the shocked faces of the young Blooded, their gills not even coming through yet and the Elect around them. For some of them, this would be akin to a theological crisis; two such Blooded, almost Chosen, could not be seen to fight like this. "Listen to me, _qr'rcbar'uloevq-uhzna_ and _r'yrpg-uhzna_ of the _Veer'thyne_," she snarled. "You are going to do what I tell you to, because I am your superior in blood. And what I'm telling you to do is to get a list of every single person in this bunker, and check the inventory for the military supplies here. Every person of twelve years or more is hereby recruited into the _Veer'thyne_. Get them armed. Everyone younger... if they can carry a pistol, give them it. If they can't, they're carrying extra ammo, or looking after the smallest children. We are not going to wait here to be slaughtered like everyone else. We are going to try to get to the _fho'z'ne-v'arf_ places, and get into the water. Yes," she paused, as the ceiling shook, "yes, I know that the blasphemers have the waterfront. They're also in the tunnels. And if they've taken one bunker, they can work out where the rest are." She gave a grin which, to a human was ferocious, but was actually rather pathetic. "It's better to die on your feet than die on your knees, right?"

"And what if we'd rather not die?" muttered someone, in the onlookers.

"Then this way is the only way," she replied, contempt in her voice. "Unless you want to cower here until they find you, and rape you, kill you, and paint the walls with your blood."

She glanced back down at Ubeevoyr, still on the ground. She could see the hate in those bulbous, dark eyes.

_He's a threat to your control,_ her thoughts went. _He opposes you, and you've embarrassed him in front of a load of [i]qr'rcbar'uloevq-uhzna_ and _r'yrpg-uhzna_ inferiors. You can't trust him.[/i]

_He tried to threaten you for dominance,_ added her growing instincts. _This is your pod, and he wouldn't be a good mate, really._

They were in agreement.

She shot him in the head at point-blank range, the hiss of the needler burst almost silent in the noise of the screaming of children from outside and the thudding from up above. There was surprisingly little blood; three thin fletchettes punching through the front of the skull and ricocheting around inside the braincase. The body of her second-in-command slumped to the floor.

_Plus, I never really liked him,_ she added, mentally.

It was less than fifteen minutes later that she was scanning down the full printed list of all the Faithful, as outside there was the noise of impromptu lessons in weapons safety from harassed _Veer'thyne_ soliders, themselves only militiamen, not professionals.

They were probably all going to die, Khonatqa thought. The prospect was especially galling to her, as true, biological near-immortality was maybe a year away. If only the _hevar_ New Earth Government had waited, then she could be safely down in _Guh'thya-leh'yi_, where her father swam even now, rather than up here in this bunker, most probably to die. And that meant that she was going to grasp at the best shot for immortality that she had right now.

She made a few notes, as she ran through the paper list. They were going have to cluster the Blooded children together. Those of weaker blood would be the vanguard and rearguard, where the casualties would be highest. It probably wasn't worth arming the rearguard at all... maybe just anything that was left over after the rest had been equipped. And, in these cases, an adult, albeit one who was part of the Elect, was more valuable than a child of weak blood, because the adult would be better at making sure that everyone else survived; they'd need a real rearguard, to actually watch for enemies behind them, and then the disposables, who could be safely sacrificed to slow down anyone who tried to follow them. Better still, they would be young enough that those with the Blood would be almost indistinguishable from those of the Elect, so there was a chance that the enemy would waste time securing them.

She had supervised the production in the _s'noev-pn'gvba p'nzc-f_. This kind of calculus of human life was what she was _good_ at.

Khonatqa glanced through the door, propped slightly open. There were so few adults here, even with the carers, who would have looked after the children while their parents were in the militia, outfitted as one of the _Veer'thyne_. Just swarms and swarms of children, all with gas-masks round their necks, swathed in heavy winter clothing over their hazard-resistant suits. The older ones were holding secured carry-cases, for the infants, or grasping onto the shoulders of their younger siblings. There were a surprising lack of tears, but plenty of tear-stained faces. Perhaps they didn't really know what was going on. Perhaps they were already cried out; the brighter ones must have already realised what had happened in the... it had been less than a day, Khonatqa realised, less than a day since the routine had become this hell. Perhaps they were just traumatised. Either way, she had to try to save as many as possible, while also keeping herself alive.

Babies could be strapped to other children, she noted, continuing, but toddlers would be more difficult, as they would be too big to be carried like that. Leash them together, and get children in the rearguard to herd them, as they could be left behind, rather than slow the group down if it had to run. She considered the benefits and costs of splitting up groups which only shared one parent; on one hand, that way they could be placed in the place which most suited their blood-purity, but on the other hand, the trauma would make them uncooperative, and would slow the group as a whole down.

She was scoring out entire sections now, highlighting the different levels of importance. A cluster of names caught her attention, and she paused. Something jolted her mind... something she'd been told yesterday.

Ah. That was it, wasn't it. She wrote the two names out on a piece of paper, and handed it to one of the _Veer'thyne_ by the door, telling her to find the two names on the paper. The three in the cluster were crossed out, and highlighted in the colour to be added to the rearguard.

After all, she knew where their mother had been placed, and what that almost certainly meant. And, really, now, she was the closest thing that they had to family.

At least on the land. And that was the point, wasn't it?

~'/|\'~

It was a cold night, the only clouds the man-made ones as the cities burned, and way up above them, in the clear air, a flock of comets could be seen, trails of fire streaking as a tail behind them, growing larger. With the wandering comets were two new stars, burning brighter than even the shard of moon visible.

The Migou had entered the atmosphere.

They were coming in hard and fast, relying on the atmosphere to breaking. It had permitted them to maintain their burn for a few precious [time partitions] longer, and so they could get to the necessary Containment Hex faster. The [Terrestrial Planet Combat] [Local Supremacy Craft] (Non-Standard) and the [Terrestrial Planet Combat] [Deployment Craft] (Non-Standard) were, in a sign of how the local forces had been obliged to upgrade to the new, suspect technologies employed by Species ᵺᶙӎшѧ, operating with reactionless-drives, and so the the flaming path they picked through the sky was only caused by the friction between their hulls and the surrounding air. But the [General Out-System] [Local Supremacy Craft], although they had been retrofitted with a few A-Pods, were still primarily based around their fusion torches, and so they were forced to full a hard-burn in the upper atmosphere, to ensure that the last part of the decent could be handled with the maximum-safe levels of burn permitted on such a Contained planet. Their thick layers of ablative ice were burning away, as they descended, tail first, contributing to their flaming passage. After this mission, they would need resupply, from one of the icy asteroids that the [General Out-System] [Large Supply Craft] had towed from the outer system to the orbit of Three. This would be a terrible time for a Tsabian breakthrough. Well, if there had been a breakthrough, it would have happened multiple Three-orbits ago, but that was the problem of a sidereal war where no side could violate lightspeed.

In the one of the [Terrestrial Planet Combat] [Local Supremacy Craft], the consensus-appointed leader of the [Deployed Containment Forces] component of the fleet (everything except for the [General Out-System] [Local Supremacy Craft], which remained under the auspices of the Void-Forces, even in-atmosphere), prepared his final message before they hit combat.

Adjunct of Deployed Strategic Reserves: This [self-form/individual] is of the opinion that all must be [aware/conscious] of what is at [stake/risk]. [Understand/comprehend] this, then, {MIGOU} and {LOYAL XENOBIOLOGICAL ASSETS} alike. When this [deployment/force] will [hunt/locate], this [deployment/force] will [kill/exterminate]. No thing is [safe/inviolate], no thing is [protected/sacred]. As it stands, this [deployment/force] is the [last/final] line of [defence/containment]. This [deployment/force] will [burn/sterilise] itself to hold the [defence/containment] line. Every [living/awake] entity can be [burned/sterilised] to [contain/restrict] the {THREATS}. Success is [mandatory/necessary]. Failure is [unthinkable/unnatural].

The Adjunct of Deployed Strategic Reserves broke the link through its implants. Words had been said and transmitted, translated into an appropriate format for the {LOYAL XENOBIOLOGICAL ASSETS}, both Blanked human and Loyalist Nazzadi, and now it was times for deeds. The majority of the [Terrestrial Planet Combat] [Local Supremacy Craft] would accompany the [General Out-System] [Local Supremacy Craft], their armoured forms, designed for atmospheric use and built around the A-Pods, more expendable than the somewhat more fragile war-ship, the massive ventral weapons making the spine of the ship, with the fusion drive at one end and the crew at the other.

All across the [Terrestrial Planet Combat] [Deployment Craft], Migou, Loyalist and Blank troops were ready, contained within the Inhibition Holds; the only thing which had prevented the human-baseline elements of their forces from being smeared across the walls in the rapid acceleration and deceleration from high orbit. Even then, multiple {LOYAL XENOBIOLOGICAL ASSET} elements of their forces had been incapacitated with broken limbs and squished tissues, and were being swapped out of their craft for the replacement pilots, who had had the benefit of acceleration tanks, rather than just the acceleration harnesses of their mecha or dropships.

The Migou elements had fared better, able to cope with higher accelerations than the terrestrial humans, but it had not been a pleasant experience. But now they (in their xenoarcanocybertechnolgical warmachines) were ready. The elite of the [Deployed Containment Forces] were seeing use here, and their role was containment, not occupation. The regular formations, made up of Migou as well as the {LOYAL XENOBIOLOGICAL ASSETS} would be taking the outer edges of the island, engaging

And the Soldier of Necessary Actions was certainly ready. Its [self-form/individual] was in control of six [body-form/individuals], a true [body-form/network], encased in their [Insertion] [Ultraheavy Assault Units]; what a human would have called a Mantis. Five blank bodies, implanted cybernetics synchronised with the ones in the [body-form/individual] it had occupied since its [thought centre] had arrived in its containment capsule on the hard-burn courier ship from the second nearest star-system from the [Containment Volume], following the emergency call for [Containment Forces]. It was now a distributed mind over seven bodies, thinking the same thoughts, its superior intellect handling all the thought processes. The final body was a back-up, in a null-sense environment back on the [Terrestrial Planet Combat] [Deployment Craft], taking minimal thought processes to run, but ensuring that as long as one of its [body-form/individuals] survived, it survived.

The Migou in command of this [Terrestrial Planet Combat] [Deployment Craft] opened up a mind-link to all the units ready for drop.

Captain in Void-Dark Hull: This [body-form/self] wishes to inform all [body-form/networks] that control over [release/initiation] has been [passed/authorised] to them.

The Soldier of Necessary Actions twitched its limbs, all of them, across its seven bodies. It was ready. It pulsed a single thought into the communications network.

Soldier N. A.: Deploy [combat-form/network].

The [Terrestrial Planet Combat] [Deployment Craft] pulsed, rails spewing out the insertion units, firing them through its own cloud of burning air as it descended, down to the surface to deploy the non-insertion units, before taking off again to give fire support. All around, from the bulbous holds of the [Deployment Craft], orbital insertion units, atmospheric fighters and smaller handing craft spewed out, a flock of smaller units around their parent craft, breaking off to hit their own objectives.

The surface of Three spread out below the Soldier of Necessary Actions and its [combat-form/network] tumbled through the air, each [Insertion] [Ultraheavy Assault Unit] wrapped in its own corona of re-entry flames.

Through the fires, to war.

~'/|\'~


	19. Chapter 15b: CATOcyclsm: Termination 2

**Chapter 15b**

**CATOcylsm: Termination**

~'/|\'~

"_The brazen arms were working more quickly. They paused no longer. Every time that a child was placed in them the priests of Moloch spread out their hands upon him to burden him with the crimes of the people, vociferating: "They are not men but oxen!" and the multitude round about repeated: "Oxen! oxen!" The devout exclaimed: "Lord! eat!" and the priests of Proserpine, complying through terror with the needs of Carthage, muttered the Eleusinian formula: "Pour out rain! bring forth!" The victims, when scarcely at the edge of the opening, disappeared like a drop of water on a red-hot plate, and white smoke rose amid the great scarlet colour. Nevertheless, the appetite of the god was not appeased. He ever wished for more. In order to furnish him with a larger supply, the victims were piled up on his hands with a big chain above them which kept them in their place. Some devout persons had at the beginning wished to count them, to see whether their number corresponded with the days of the solar year; but others were brought, and it was impossible to distinguish them in the giddy motion of the horrible arms. This lasted for a long, indefinite time until the evening. Then the partitions inside assumed a darker glow, and burning flesh could be seen. Some even believed that they could descry hair, limbs, and whole bodies. Night fell; clouds accumulated above the Baal. The funeral-pile, which was flameless now, formed a pyramid of coals up to his knees; completely red like a giant covered with blood, he looked, with his head thrown back, as though he were staggering beneath the weight of his intoxication."_

- Gustave Flaubert, "_Salammbô_"

~'/|\'~

The three Evangelions watched the points of light in the night sky above them. To the west and north, the fires in the major settlements lit up the sky, but here, in the middle of Iceland, it was dark, and the trails of fire left by the Migou as they braked using the atmosphere were clear.

Then, suddenly, the number of trails increased a hundred-fold.

"That'll be them dropping the smaller units," whispered Asuka. "They'll hit first, take the ground and try to take out any capital-grade defences before they move the ships in."

"Correct," said Rei.

"Capital grade defences," said Shinji, suppressing the urge to throw up. "That's us, isn't it."

"Yes," both the girls said at once. The stress of the moment meant that Rei only received a short glare.

A view window opened on their screens. Misato's face stared out at them, any trace of her normal levity gone.

"We're getting seismic shifts all over the island," she said. A wave of static washed across the screen, the smart programme trying to prevent corruption of the image, and giving up, switching to a static image. "Ritsuko?"

An image of Dr Akagi appeared. Her voice was tinny and metallic, altered by the many levels of encryption applied to get it from London-2 to the Evangelions. There was a multiple second latency. "Yes. Geological tracking stations all over the globe are reporting major seismic movements. The major fault lines suffering large-scale earthquakes; San Andreas, Dead Sea, Alpine... hope the bugs enjoy that one," she said, reading off from her arglasses, "they're all slipping." She sighed. "If those idiotic proposals to rebuild Los Angeles as a major arcology had gone ahead, we'd really be in trouble," Ritsuko added, referring to the glassed remains of a once great city, flattened at the end of AW1 when one of the Loyalist Nazzadi colony ships deliberately crashed rather than accept their defeat in the Nazzadi Civil War. "As for why you haven't been experiencing it... well, I don't know, honestly. You should be getting the worst of it."

Shinji winced.

_Wonderful. Earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. I hope Yuki, Gany and the twins are all right, in T-3._

"It's estimated that the Herald will surface in less than thirty minutes; from what we can tell, it is less than two hundred kilometres below boundary between the upper and lower mantle, plus or minus forty," she added. "It has been moving... oddly... from what we can tell, at least."

"You just need to hold them off until then," said Misato.

"We don't have half-an-hour," snapped Asuka. "You know they'll be using Mantises and Spiders in large numbers, and they're superheavies, half our height. And both of them pack Behemoth-scaled null-rays. You said that you'd get us capital-grade support; where is it!" the girl demanded. ""We're linked up to Unit 01's sensors, and we can see the bugs coming in!"

"Yes, about that," said Ritsuko, her voice hesitant. "You're going to have to shut that link off, and set the Evangelions to autistic mode. It is, as you should known, Second Lieutenant, standard policy when up against the Migou. All major systems must be physically isolated. They're better at information warfare than us. And the naval forces near Rejavik are still engaged, while if the ones up north move, the assault on the Deep One city will fail. They've already been... experienced set-backs," Ritsuko corrected herself, and hoped that the non-Rei Children hadn't caught the slip. Because the First Child always noticed everything; even the things she shouldn't, or technically couldn't have.

She waited for the explosion from Asuka; one which would surely match anything that the Herald was causing as it rose through the Earth.

It didn't come. Instead the red-head froze, taking on a tone as cold as anything that Rei routinely used, but in a sense, it was more terrible, because there was the knowledge that this coldness had come from burning rage, rather than her default state of being. "I see," Asuka said. "And therefore you aren't planning to get us out of here or provide any proper support for what we're facing. Despite the fact that, together, we might just about have the same level of fire power as a single battlecruiser, and there are 35-odd Swarm Ships up there." It wasn't a question.

"I'm afraid not. There aren't the ships to spare, and they wouldn't get there in time, anyway. It's necessary to capture the Herald." Ritsuko was almost apologetic. "And you do have the AT-Field."

There was the sound of cracking knuckles over the link, the harmonics oddly shifted by the LCL that surrounded them. "Right. In that case, Rei, you are going to take out any ship that comes into range. Aim for the A-Pods or the main weapons; cripple them if you can't destroy them. I'll lend you my Engine for as long as possible, but when I tell you to eject the umbilical, you _will_ do it, yes? Synch your smaller weapons to your main fire, as you have no long-range sensors. Teach the bugs fear."

Rei nodded, an unseen smile of gratitude on her face. "Understood. I will follow your orders, Second Child." Now, she finally knew what she would do. Reality clicked into place. The path opened before her.

_**fire**_

_**bodies**_

_**awakening**_

"Shinji, you're anti-air. Set all your smaller weapons to full LAI autonomous fire, as you're the only one who has the sensors that they can use. To do that, you open the main control window... look, someone... say, Misato, do something useful and guide him through it. Otherwise, you are going to have to kill the air-dropping mecha. Some of them will hit the ground, but try to stop as many as you can. They drop feet first," she said, calling back to her training, "so one or two hits from that plasma weapon will melt the legs, and they'll crumple when they hit the ground. Just track across the sky, and let the aimbots do the fine control. Tear them apart."

Shinji swallowed a mouthful of LCL, and took a shuddering breath. "Yes," he said. "Okay." It did feel better, he thought, to have someone actually taking control.

"That leaves me, with the shortest ranged weapon," she continued. "Therefore, I'm going to hold them off from you two. If they get troopships down," and she grinned viciously then, the fire reigniting, "then they're going to wish that they hadn't." She paused. "Not for very long, of course, but perhaps if they believe in reincarnation, they're going to learn not to mess with me." Unit 02 hefted the plasmathrower, green eyes blazing in the darkness.

Behind her, the top of a mountain exploded, magma shooting forth into the sky. The tremor pulsed through the land, as a barrage of molten rock and the top of the mountain rained down, boulders and globs of molten rock the size of houses raining down.

"_Ein jeder Evangelion ist schrecklich_," she whispered, as the blast-cloud of dust washed over the three figures.

~'/|\'~

Things were a little less confident in Nero Command.

"_Solomon Throne_, report! Is there anyone left alive?" repeated Agent Tome. He had largely given up hope now, but was still trying to contact anyone. He sighed, and began to start sending the signals that would tell the command LAI to launch a hard burn (the term was still used, despite the fact that, for a A-Pod equipped vehicle, there was no reaction mass or burning) to get away from the place. He slammed his hands down in rage, as the system had already been set to autistic mode as soon as the Migou had been detected, locking all autonomous commands out. The only way to remedy that would be to physically go and remove the settings; there weren't any backdoors that could be used to avoid the fact that the communications systems could not communicate with any of the rest of the ship beyond their own hardwired interfaces. The _Solomon Throne_ had been designed too well for that kind of potential weak-spot.

"For God's sake, there's no way we can leave them in there," shouted Captain Martello, waving his hands in the air. "Did you even think of the consequences of us losing three sixteen-year olds, who were only there on dubiously legal grounds! Or that there may be other Herald-class entities out there, and all of Project Evangelion's assets are on the ground there right now!"

"Yes," replied the Major, leaning towards the angry man. "I also thought of the consequences of the Migou getting their mandibles on the Herald themselves, or of it getting free, now that they've," jerking a thumb at the Special Services agent, "summoned it. The air units we've pulled in should buy us five minutes at least; possibly more, depending on how cautious the Migou are being. Add that to the batteries of Cyclopses we've pulled forwards; you know just as well as I do how their lasers can give both AA and anti-missile coverage, even with all that dust from the eruption. With the Evangelions there, we can trade our own mecha and aircraft for time for more than long enough. They're going to have to pull down capital ships to get there before we can engage the Herald."

"Something they have in large numbers," shouted back Captain Martello. "Stop trying to act like they're going to be overly conservative, when this is the biggest damn Migou force we've ever seen, _and_ they've pulled two damn warships in-atmosphere. This is stupid! Pull them back!"

"Captain," said the Major, softly, "stop acting like a child, or I will see you first sedated, then court-marshalled. For goodness sake, the Children are being less childish about this thing than you are."

The man glared at her, balling his fists, but locked his jawline and shut up.

"Yes, about that," said Agent Tome, standing directly behind her. "I'm afraid there's something else that needs to be done. The _Solomon Throne_ is not responding; I did warn you of the risks involved. It cannot be permitted to fall into enemy hands, and it may potentially be contaminated by the extranormal given the fact that the warning systems report that there are no humans alive on board any more. It needs to be completely destroyed; nothing of it can survive."

"You want us to scuttle the ship?" asked the Major. "I want a clear order from you before I'll authorise the destruction of a capital ship."

_Uh... apart from that one we used against Mot. But that was necessary, and it worked. And it was technically an accident. And once they replace the ventral laser, and give it new armour, and undo all those modifications we did, I'm sure that they can rebuild it._

"Yes. The _Throne_ must be destroyed; we can't let the Migou get their claws on it."

"Good." She paused. "Open a channel to..."

"I heard you, Misato," said Asuka. "I'm ready to melt the ship to the bedrock. Just say the word, and it's plasma."

"Do it."

The flare of white could be seen from the E-9s all over the island, harsh white light cast against the clouds. It continued for almost ten seconds, lancing forth, up and down, deep carving into the volcanic rock as it cut through the capital vessel.

"It's vapour," Unit 02 reported. "I'm connecting my Unit up to the Prototype now, so if you want anything else melted, it's going to have to wait until we kill every last one of the bugs."

The profile from Unit 02 on the screen changed, the mD/D-Engine turning yellow, as the back-up D-Engines choked without the use of the D-Cells, cutting the powerflow to the Evangelion to an extent that it would be barely possible for Asuka to move. Unit 00, meanwhile, gained an icon which represented the external source of power, and the values for recharge for the charge beam actually fell below those for the cooling cycle period.

"Oh, Asuka, I'm so proud of you right now," Misato said softly, glancing over at the read-outs from Unit 02. "Give those bugs hell."

~'/|\'~

Sirens filled the internal network at the camps, broadcast over the communications devices, rather than overtly, where the rescued prisoners could hear it.

"Kilo-Alpha-Four," the code went. "All individuals report to evacuation stations. This is not a drill." The same words repeated over and over again.

"'Kilo-Alpha-Four'? What's that?" asked Antonio, shaking his head. He'd had this helmet on for far too long, and his head was feeling unpleasant, sweat-soaked hair compacted up against the bands which stopped it sliding around. He wasn't expecting an answer, at least until he could find someone to ask, but the LAI in the helmet answered for him.

"Kilo-Alpha-Four is the highest grade emergency evacuation code in use in an evacuation camp such as this. Please ensure that the armour is running off a clean air supply, turn off all monitoring equipment, including free-operating drones and report immediately to the nearest evacuation point. This armour has entered autistic mode. All wireless interactions have been prevented, with the exception of radio communications, which is physically isolated from the main suit network." The voice, a pleasant male baritone paused for a beat, then continued. "Would you like me to place a navigation marker at your nearest location, and calculate the most efficient route?"

"Please," he said, looking around, picking up the backpack of gear and one of the back-up severs. "Var, ask it to explain what is happening."

The other man nodded. "'kay," he said.

"Please wait... complete," the LAI said, almost interrupting itself. "Please follow the AR path marked in green."

Antonio glanced at his cameraman. "You want help with the exosuit?"

"Yes, please. Just hold this, so I can strap myself in," Varuta said, passing another identical backpack to his colleague. "Oh, yeah, damn it, check that the drones are in place on the back. I forgot. We don't want to lose them."

"You've guessed what this is, right," said the human, as he stepped around the figure of the exosuit, checking that the four remaining drones, of the six that they'd started with, were firmly in place on the mounts on the back of the suit, recharging off the D-Engine. "Yeah, they're secure."

"Course I have," Varuta responded. "Like we didn't see this kind of warning on the Eastern Front. We're under attack, and they're infowar and emfog heavy."

"Yes," said Antonio, "exactly. Exactly like what happens in a Migou attack, yeah?"

"Bugs? Here?"

"Not surprising, really," he said, passing the other backpack to Varuta, who stashed it in the compartment inside the exosuit, jamming it in. "Think about it. We're pretty far north. Of course they're going to be sending scouting parties out once they noticed what we were doing."

Varuta shook his head, the head on the exosuit now mimicking his actions. "Listen. Listen how everything's changed." And indeed everything had. The noise inside the sealed dome was now purposeful, rather than the randomness that comes from hundreds of people doing their own ordered things. "I think they're evacuating _everyone_."

"Everyone?"

"Yeah." The Nazzadi flexed his fingers, and the articulated fingers of the exosuit flexed with him. "Okay, sealing up. Keep all hands and fingers blah blah blah."

The front of the exosuit slid shut, folding out from the almost-wing-like structures which it formed when open. The transparent faceplate lit up with AR piloting symbols.

"Oh. My arm. It got cut off. I'm suing," said Antonio, in a deadpan tone.

"You say that every time. It's not funny any more. Now, perhaps we should..."

The sentence was interrupted by the shattering of the memoform roof that arced over the entire sealed dome, sending shards of hardened plastic flying everywhere, which, when removed from the programmed design, softened, splattering everything below with a dirty-greyish-greenish-blue plastic. It broke in another place, then another, the area between the holes starting to sag, as the design liquefied from so much traumatic damage, before the repair systems could ooze more material into place.

That was when the shooting started. One of the projectiles revealed itself to be a Migou automated emplacement, which, in a sickeningly organic way despite its metallic manufactured appearance, unfolded itself, digging its claws deep into the ground. It was squat and rounded, covered in armour plating which could survive re-entry, and armed to the teeth. It contented itself with automatic fire from its projectile weapons, though; high velocity, smart barbs which braked just before impact, flaring out. They didn't kill. They merely paralysed and rendered unconscious, ready for Clarification.

A facility like this was an asset for the Migou. Certainly, they would restore the traumatised inhabitants to a much better state than the New Earth Government could. Some idiots believed that the Migou tortured their captives, breaking them through hideous pain, deprivation, and psychological warfare, before physically cutting open their brains and operating. It was a charming lie, which allowed some hope that a captive taken could be saved, rescued before their psyche had broken entirely.

But, really, why would a species with such a knowledge of the natural world, and a much wider definition of the word "natural", have to use such crude methods? It was quick, and relatively painless, a purely physical process. Control the brain, and you controlled the person. An incredibly complex network of meshed fibres, at the nano-and-microscales, ran throughout their brains, a secondary neural network through which each thought ran. It edited the thoughts, the memories, tying them together in a way which used the subject's own mind to work out what should be controlled and which could be retained. It turned the mind against itself, and, worse, improved it, making the subject smarter and fast-wiring their reflexes as fine nanoscale meshes snaked their way around the nervous system.

The Blanks were left happy, content in themselves, able to understand the world to a much greater extent than they had been prior to the Migou intervening, and actually fairly well balanced. And utterly, irrevocably loyal to the Migou. There had been attempts to remove the structures, removing all altered tissue and regrowing it with arcanotherapy. The brain actually grew them back. And purely surgical attempts to excise it were impossible; even if the implanted structures did not detect the attempted intervention and simply shut down autonomous functions, they requires the removal of so much brain tissue that the person was worse than a vegetable, not even able to breathe on their own.

The fact that the other two impacts were revealed to have been from landing craft; one carrying Blanked human infantry, clad in full NEG combat gear, and the second, power armoured Loyalist Nazzadi, proudly wearing the colours of the fictional Nazzadi empire, only made the situation worse.

"_Harangy_ traitors," Varuta muttered, the fingers of his exosuit tightly gripped, as if he were imagining it around the throat of one of the Loyalists.

"Just fucking run," shouted Antonio, already sprinting along the green AR path. Everyone knew that the Migou just killed the Nazzadi; for the other _Homo sapiens_ subspecies, Blanking awaited. "Follow the arrow!"

~'/|\'~

There was the terrible noise of a charge beam, a thunderous sound that went far beyond in magnitude anything that a human would call noise. It was only visible by the after-trail, a glowing green trail of ionised air which dispersed as soon as the arcanomagnetic field ceased. Far above, one of the large comets jolted, and its path became a parabola.

"Hit," said Rei, flatly. "Main A-Pod cluster destroyed. Drone Ship now lacks the capacity to reduce its velocity to a level where impact can be prevented or made survivable. Calculated location of impact sent to NEG forces for salvage of remains. Cooling cycle in process." The charge beam vented gas in a vast expansive cloud, which washed around the figure in Type-D armour; a cloud illuminated by the constant stream of suns coming from Unit 01. The entire area was lit up in burning white, as Shinji, tracking the LAI-given boxes on his screen rather than the actual targets, moved from cluster to cluster.

"How are you doing this?" said Asuka softly, almost sub-vocalising the words, as Unit 02 stood, almost useless, running off the smaller D-Engines which were just enough to keep major systems functional. "These shots should be impossible. I mean, you're doing them with no sensors."

"Capacitors charged," said Rei. "Cooling cycle still in process." She paused. "I do not aim for the ships. I aim for where the path of the trajectory of the ship intersects with the path of the relativistic arcanomagnetically-contained protons."

"But..." Asuka's eyes narrowed. "That's a recursive process."

"Yes. It is. It would require some kind of knowledge of the future actions of the target before firing, and possibly even some kind of clairvoyance. Cooling cycle complete. Firing."

Another terrible noise. A new star blossomed in the skies above, the explosion lighting up the sky, and a wave of static washed through radios across the hemisphere.

"Miss. However, the arcanomagnetic field of the charge beam destabilised the containment arcanomagnetic fields of the ventral 'null rays' mounted on the nose of one of the Swarm Ships. Sadly, that led to the release of a small amount of antimatter, which was enough to totally destroy the ship. No entity survived. Two other Swarm Ships, and a Drone Ship suffered non-negligible hull damage in the blast, although they remain operational. Cooling cycle in process."

Asuka listened to the flat voice of the other girl, rolling off the facts. "Did you do that on purpose, to show off?" she asked. The red-head wasn't quite sure if that was exceptionally annoying, or sort of awesome. Well, it was the former, obviously.

Obviously.

"It was necessary that such a shot be made. It was the only way of affecting a target that high, due to issues of proton dispersal. Capacitors charged. Cooling cycle still in process."

The boom of the detonation of the Swarm Ship torn apart by the detonation of its own antimatter arrived with the pressure wave, finally crawling its way down the many tens of kilometres to the source of that which had killed it. It was ignored by the Evangelions, though the thud of the Earth could be felt slightly, as it destabilised a snowfall somewhere off in the distance.

"So, was that a 'yes' or 'no'?" Asuka asked. "And do you have to narrate everything that happens?"

"Neither. It was a refusal to answer the question. And yes. It is necessary. With the lack of sensors, it is necessary to document the efficacy of my tactics and battlefield decisions, so that I may improve and perform my duties in a superlative fashion." She paused. "Remember, I still have the lowest synchronisation ratio of the pilots," Rei added, conversationally.

"Do you two mind?" interrupted Shinji, even though he did rather admire that which he suspected might have been an attempt to placate Asuka at the end. "Some of us here are trying to hit very small moving targets," as the stream of plasma swept around through the sky, no longer targeting the re-entry fireballs, but now the aerial units on his sensors, "without the aid of precognition here, and you're being distracting. Um, and Rei, there's a ..."

"... cooling cycle complete." There was the terrible noise again. "Hit. Hull not breached. However, Bremsstrahlung radiation induced by the impact of the charged particle beam has killed the central command centre on the Drone Ship, and has fused the ventral laser. Target is a reduced threat. Cooling cycle in process."

"... yes," Shinji tailed off. "They're starting to get to land in larger numbers; my LAI can't follow them all now that they're no longer leaving nice fiery paths, so I'm only getting some of them."

Asuka stretched her fingers, wrapping them around the handles in the entry plug. "Right, First Child, I'm going to need my Engine back."

"It is done." The umbilical cord popped out of the back of Unit 00, and began to retract into the Mass Production Model. "Charge cycle is now slowed; rate of fire will correspondingly decrease."

_Power supply at 100% of expected capacity_ flashed up on the display of Unit 02. _PP3-P is online and fully functional._

"Keep firing, you two!" Asuka shouted at the other two pilots.

"I never stopped," muttered Shinji.

"Don't get distracted," she continued, ignoring the boy. "I'll protect you. And kill them all."

The first few Migou units survive the hellish drop through the overlapping laser grids of the other NEG forces, and the torrents coming from the Evangelions, got a rather nasty surprise when the forty-metre biped became visible. There was something rather primal about the way that the green fires burned in the eyes of Unit 02, as it illuminated the area with raw stellar materials.

There was also something rather terminal about it.

~'/|\'~

CATO Command were watching the feed from Nero with awe. Specifically, they were watching Unit 00. Occasionally, they remembered to close their jaws, or at least have them so they weren't _quite_ so wide open.

"_Amli katu wha disnu..._" whispered Admiral Tatuta. "I can see why Ashcroft came up with the Test Pilot sophistry if they wanted to deploy her." He paused. "Not sure about the point of the boy, though," he added, more disapprovingly. "I suppose they had to settle for the other two; no wonder they call her the First Child."

"You know, technically, doesn't that give her one of the best kill records in the whole NEG, Army or Navy?" asked Field Marshal Kora, similarly in awe. "And she's getting them with that charge beam; it's really rather stripped down, compared to what a true capship would have, isn't it? Look at how she's getting the indirect kills, rather than proper hull breaches."

The Admiral nodded. "I think she's now in the top twenty five still living, just from this," he admitted. "But," and his voice grew more serious, "they're going to be having problems with coolant soon. The internal reservoir has to be running low after the rest of CATO, and the fact that they're running it off two engines, rather than one, can't help."

"Can we get any supplies there?"

The admiral stared at him. "Yes. Of course," he managed. "Because we _really_ can refill a internal liquid helium reservoir just like that, in battlefield conditions. Especially on a stripped-down one like that, which will have compromised such things," he said, in a withering tone of voice. "What, do you army types think that the volumes you need for the operation of a capital-ship charge beam just comes in handy magazines you can just slot in, yes?"

"Well, yes," Kora admitted. "Mecha-grade ones do. Forget I asked."

"Fine." The admiral sighed. "And when the Invictus-class battleships start to see operation, we can finally have proper anti-capital ship firepower. She's beating the rest of CATO's fleet for kills, for goodness sake. The Victory-class battlecruisers just aren't cutting it any more against Swarm Ships, with the recent upgrades that the bugs have done. I have no idea why we compromised the design by giving them organic mecha forces." He paused. "I just wish there was a place we could get more like her from, though," he added wistfully.

~'/|\'~

Down in the London-2 Geocity, the false stars in the ceiling shone down upon the wilderness that surrounded the small "city" which was the visible part of the Ashcroft-run complex. Light streamed from the tower at the centre of the main building, the windows opaque, yet glowing.

Inside, the Representative and his deputy stood in the vast, well-lit office, around a high-resolution augmented reality map. Already, areas were losing their details, as the Migou took down the aerial coverage afforded to NEG forces. Their ships, tiny in comparison to Iceland, were just visible; tiny flies above the mass of land. From this detached perspective, the damage that the Herald was doing to the geography could be seen in perspective, with the plumes of smoke over newly erupted volcanoes, and even the way that the sides of certain mountains were bulging suspiciously. The location of the Evangelions could be seen, though; the lightshow from Unit 01 was enough, even if the map wasn't tracking each individual shot from Rei as it reached out into the ceiling, high above.

"This will have an adverse affect on the biosphere." said Fuyutsuki. He permitted himself a small smile. "I wonder how the Storm's logistical chains, insofar as they understand such a concept, will be affected by this."

"It will not affect us," was the answer he received. "We are not dependent upon harvests any more."

"This is appropriate, though. Moloch rises, the mountains erupt, strange lights are seen in the sky, and the crops fail. Superstitionists would already be burning their children in supplication to this creature."

"'The savage, like ourselves, feels the oppression of his impotence before the powers of Nature; but having in himself nothing that he respects more than Power, he is willing to prostrate himself before his gods, without inquiring whether they are worthy of his worship. Pathetic and very terrible is the long history of cruelty and torture, of degradation and human sacrifice, endured in the hope of placating the jealous gods: surely, the trembling believer thinks, when what is most precious has been freely given, their lust for blood must be appeased, and more will not be required,'" said Gendo, staring at the map which occupied the floor.

Fuyutsuki sighed. "There's no need to go quoting Russel at me. As I recall, I was the one who introduced Yui to that book, and she it to you."

"The point remains apt, though. And particularly appropriate."

"Well, yes. 'The religion of Moloch — as such creeds may be generically called — is in essence the cringing submission of the slave, who dare not, even in his heart, allow the thought that his master deserves no adulation,'" completed the older man. "'Since the independence of ideals is not yet acknowledged, Power may be freely worshipped, and receive an unlimited respect, despite its wanton infliction of pain.'"

"You are aware what has happened, though? If only by implication?"

Fuyutsuki paused, as he processed the change in topic. "Ikari," he said somewhat wearily, "I have been here, with you, almost constantly since nine at night _yesterday_. I am aware that a lot of things have happened."

"It was the first thing I ever said to her," the younger man continued more softly, eyes invisible behind the image projected against his glasses. "And she did it. It is just that I know what will now be done."

"Ah. Yes. Dagon is dead."

Gendo turned up to stare at his former mentor, glasses clearing as they displayed only the normal entopics that hung around his office. "Define 'Dagon'." He paused. "And for that matter, define 'dead'."

~'/|\'~

The Migou deployment put Operation CATO to shame. CATO had been a wave, washing forwards in a manner much faster than in the past, but still in a manner that would have been recognisable one hundred years ago. The Migou were a rain shower, a fluid, expanding to fill any and every open area, washing around obstacles and isolating them, cutting them off. [Combat-form/networks] were superior to human units, there was no denying it. The coordination of purpose and the many eyes in one mind meant that they achieved an efficiency that was beyond soldiers that were forced to communicate with each other, which were separate entities. By contrast, the Loyalist and Blank units, which saw use away from the Containment Area in the centre of the Hex, were 'merely' exceptionally good, the Blanks combat networked to a level that the NEG could not achieve in such an emfog and infowar heavy environment, and the Loyalists a highly trained force specialising in mobility warfare.

A squad of eight _Oyanari_ powered armour pounded down the street, greyish-purple armour painted in an odd cross-hatching of bright green and yellow, as fast as they could. Behind them, the Drone ship sat on the ground, heavy, its lower hull opened up like a split ribcage to produce an armoured landing zone from which Blanks, Loyalists and Migou units deployed en masse. The air was filled with the fine silvery dust of emfog nano-and-micromachines, both trying to interrupt each others communications. It was actually beautiful, _Weny Komdy_ Hikary had always felt (and had written poetry to that effect); the way that anti-air and anti-missile lasers were made visible by the incredibly fine dust, their light reflected. Of course, it was literally blindingly bright, so the beauty was somewhat minimised, as the smart systems in the eyepieces tried to regulate the image shown on the screen on the inside of the armour.

Explosive flowers blossomed against the hull and in the air around the Deployment Craft they had come down in, as elements of an off-shore missile barrage slipped through the laser grid. The ship lurched, but stayed steady, continuing to disgorge its cargo. It retaliated with its own barrage, launched from within the ship, as barb-like missiles fired directly upwards, high into the atmosphere, splitting apart into their smaller explosive components before zeroing in on the launch-site. There was a terrible noise, like a massive charge beam, which echoed throughout the area; the centre of this cold island, beyond the horizon was lit up with some unnaturally bright light. They had seen the lights in the night sky as they came in, dodged the streams of plasma which had jetted up from there, and from what the Creators had told them, there was something terrible waking up in there.

One of the robotic voices the Migou used for communicating with their loyal creations, who had stayed true and faithful, linked into their communications network. It indicated that it was coming from a Dragonfly, one of the stealthy scout mecha which were one of the biggest banes in the NEG's side.

_[Targets/foes] located,_ it informed them in the Nazzadi tongue. _[position/location] marked_.

"_Dy vulakrony_," she thanked the Yuggothian fungoid. Little did she know that the [self-form/individual] controlling the [body-form/individual] in the Dragonfly was actually from a smaller mining facility in the Oort cloud, but, all in all, it was largely an irrelevancy.

The targets were on the other side of the wall; the projection before her eyes labelled them as six in number, and an unrecognised model of power armour.

"_Ib astany va juta rati, mandatvulakausi!_" she ordered, and her squadron fell in behind her, taking a sharp turn to the left, and smashing through the wall of the apartment complex, pulling to a stop in the hallway on the other side of the room through which they'd entered.

"_Twi ib twi, krasy-lula-kwari_," she ordered, laser cannon raised, as the squadron broke into the pairs which they used for house-cleaning; one armour supporting while the other advanced. "_Mandatermakausa absi ni kasi._"

"_Kompreha_," her second-in-command answered. "[i]Sufiki ui oirakroni vy nazzady," he said to the rest of the squad, reinforcing her orders, "_mandatermi absi ni kasi. Terma tota vy bitka._"

The house shook, the roar of superheated plasma and the terrible noise of charge beams blanking out all other sound as the audio receptors clamped down, audible even through the armour of the _Oyanari_. A secondary explosion rattled much closer, as the ceiling cracked, and the lights began to flicker. A wave of static washed over the communication systems.

The feed from the Dragonfly dropped out.

A wave of doubt washed over her. They could wait for another Dragonfly to get them a fresh feed, or they could move on. If they stayed here, then the hostile forces could escape. If they moved, they could end up walking into a trap.

Her mind was made up for her. "_Weny Komdy_ Hikary," reported one of the rear teams, "_za obsera sufiki jigabaki,_" using the Nazzadi word for the insect-like gunships, "_ni vi atmosi._"

She swore. If they didn't have total air cover (and the fact that the Dragonfly had been shot down suggested that they didn't), this whole affair would be much harder. She contented herself with the fact that it must be necessary, for the Creators to order that painful acceleration and deceleration from orbit, which had left two of her squad unsuitable for combat, their replacements not used to the tight camaraderie of the _Oyanari_.

"_Twi ib twi_," she said. "_Sufiki mandatvuli ohny objimpery._" And that was that, with no objections made, even by the newcomers.

As the armoured suits made their way through the building, the terrible noise roared again from the centre of the island, accompanied by the more minor crack of the lesser charge beams and the noise of superheated air, as the Chalybions continued to pick off the Migou-allied units emerging from the Drone Ship, LAI-drones providing targeting, picking off targets through buildings, always on the move. The NEG artillery was zeroing in, too, the indirect-fire railguns lobbing smart shells onto the landing zones and filling the air with false targets that allowed the bombers and air-supremacy fighters movement even in this anti-air heavy environment.

The point at which the eight Loyalists realised that they were not alone in this building was when one pair of Oyanari failed to check in at the designated time, their signal lights remaining off. There had been no emergency calls, no warnings. If there had, they had been lost under the pulses of static that the discharge of plasma weapons and charge beams produced.

"_Mandatinstra dy pule vi twi nazzada kubot twi hi kontrseri!_" demanded Hikary, the _Weny Komdy_ of the force. Consultation revealed that the two had been near the top of the house.

"_Twi poteneplumakroni?_" asked her second-in-command, the _Meda Komda_ of the squad.

The _Weny Komdy_ flashed her assent light red. No, it wasn't possible that they'd fallen, both at the same time, and without warning. "_Contrserakausy_," she said. "_Seki nazzadi persesakausi pla termakausi absul gurili._"

"_Dy vulakrony_!" responded the female members, as the remnants of the squad moved out, taking the stairs slowly, making sure that they could support their armoured mass. If there were hostiles up there, they were going to get ended, in the name of the _nazzadi_.

"_Da vulakrona_," were the words of the male ones. As they climbed the stairs, it could be seen that this was not just an ordinary apartment complex. The fact that the stairs were reinforced to take the weight of a suit of powered armour without creaking was enough to show that, a fact further accentuated by the way the walls were a thin layer of plaster over bunker-level defences

"_Poteneseri estel tenemeni seri sufiki gura oa Dagonvela?_" asked one of the front team, his red eyes scanning the walls and all the entrances for any signs of the detestable inferior beings that actually gave themselves to worship of the {THREATS}. The Creators had shown to the _nazzadi_ the consequences of such a path, explained what inevitably happened. Only the Creators could protect the _nazzadi_, and even their inferior cousin _anfrazzadi_, and, yes, their miscegenated offspring, the _amlati_ and _sidoci_ (though all the others were inferior to the true _nazzadi_). And the Creators needed their help, against the dangers such as this.

The assent light flashed green. Yes, this probably was a Dagonite fortification. But who was in control of it now?

The EMP grenades attached to the tripwire failed to answer the question. Neither did the pair of anti-armour charge detonating at perfect chest height for a power armoured suit, one fore and one aft. What they did manage to do was tear open the chest of the front suit, severing the pilot at the waist, and damage the D-Engine in another so badly it was forced to perform an emergency cut to prevent a Horizon event, crippling the armour, as well as tearing off the arm of the suit and the limb of the _nazzady_ inside, along with it.. The survivor at the front began to fire wildly, laser pulses blowing head-sized chunks out of the reinforced walls in clouds of expanding vapour, before she was ordered to stop to avoid bringing the building down on them.

"_Soli komdi komprehi estel whiku termakrona twi nazzadi_," remarked _Meda Komda_ Jula, while the medic tried to staunch the bleeding from the injured survivor, the front of the Oyanari opening up and the movements desynchronising to allow him to examine the patient with his bare hands. His diagnosis light flashed red. She couldn't be saved; she'd lost too much blood. The medic winced inside his under-suit, and administered a lethal dose of painkillers, to kill without pain, in peace, before he bend down, and inserted a cable from his armour to hers, to grab the data from the powered armour's black box . Once the necessary actions had been taken, he stepped back, sealing up his amour again, as another one of the _nazzadi_ vaporised the body, releasing the spirit from its mortal shell of flesh to move on to another life.

"_Contrserakausy_," was their leader's answer. "_Twi nazzadi... pule seri objtermi?_"

It was true, he had to admit. No bodies, no wreckage. And, certainly, the anti-armour charges had done enough damage to the interior of the building that there wasn't a way that they could have missed that... unless there were magic interior decorating goblins who also had replaced the LEDs that the EMP had fused.

Which implied that someone had set (or at least activated) the trap _after_ the _nazzadi_ had been through.

The squad, only half now remaining from the force that had dropped in only minutes earlier, continued; even more slowly, checking for tripwires and remote detonated devices as best they could. There were attempts to contact the rest of the Creator-led forces, but the thick structure of the former Dagonite reinforced position seemed to counteract it. The _nazzadi_ were envious, in truth, of the way that the Creators seemed able to keep their squads so coordinated.

The echoes of that terrible noise from the centre of the island came again, drowning out even the closer sounds of conflict.

"_Weny Komdy_," reported the new pointman, "_da persesa soli objtermi Oyanari. Terma oa liberatagi._"

"_Kwer?_" asked Hikary, her mouth dry. Which one was lying there, power armour ripped apart by plasma fire?

"_Wery_," answered the pointman, after checking what details could be seen on the remains of the armour. The front had been fried by a direct hit from a plasma weapon; the few scraps of the _nazzady_ left inside charred flesh over burnt bone. From the fact that the armour was still there, though, the weapon couldn't have been too large. That confirmed it. There was hostile powered armour in this place; whether NEG or Dagonite, they didn't know.

The blast which tore out apart the ruined armour and ripped off his legs the second he tried to download the black box still came as a surprise. Whoever had done this had packed the insides of the armour with explosives after scooping out the remains of the pilot, leaving just enough to be seen through the hull. They had known enough about the respect that the _nazzadi_, the real ones, had for their dead, and of their protocols, to use it against them.

That clarified who it was in here considerably.

"_Harangy 'Newi Earthi Govermenti'_," swore the _Meda Komda_. That left them with only three survivors, and one MIA. They'd all taken damage in the blast, which had turned the ruined armour into an impromptu fragmentation grenade, scything into the walls and damaging the other powered armours.

"_Absul mandatlevy!_" snapped Hikary. They were pulling out of here, getting out into the air where they could call for the Creators to take it out with heavy units. Clearing a place like this in powered armour was going to be hell; far better for a true mecha to blow it up.

It was on the way _down_ that the stairs were detonated, collapsing and crushing the first two that had stepped forwards, the cracks of a too-rapidly fired hypersonic railgun coinciding with the holes that were punched into their prone figures. The _Weny Komdy_ fled, jumping down, and so survived long enough to be picked off by a shot from an EECU Klinge Type-12 Pulse Weapon which punched through a wall to hit her, tearing off one leg at the knee, and leaving her sprawled face down in this hell of a building which had consumed her entire force.

Then she saw them. They weren't truly invisible, but they were the same colour as the background, only those six yellow eyes visible. But they were far too small! They were probably shorter than she was outside of her Oyanari, certainly, they were too small to be carrying anti-armour energy weapons like that. That kind of knowledge was the preserve of the Creators, according to everything she knew!

She tried to lift herself up on her arms, raise one arm to bring the laser-cannon to bear. The figures pre-empted her with their own laser fire, a continuous beam crippling the weapon, moving to sever the control muscles in the offending limb, and, scoring a line across her fallen back, moved on to perform the same procedure on the other one.

It was at that point she realised, though the sudden clarity of the Creator-made combat stimulants that had been administered when the inner-suit had detected damage, that they wanted her alive. And from the way that they had herded her, cutting off the paths of escape, using the _nazzadi_ doctrines for where the the squad leader would be positioned, it had been _her_ that they'd wanted. They had been using a building in which the squad were isolated from the Creators, and had been fast enough to prevent them from leaving for backup; the genius of the plan had been almost prescient. Even the weapons they had used to take her down had been used to cauterise and contain, rather than kill, and now that they had her immobile, she could do nothing but scream as the three six-eyed figures pried open the front, hyperedged blades fitting into the thin gaps at the cockpit and puncturing the seal, knife thrust _through_ the layer that protected it, before pulling her out. One holding down the _Weny Komdy_, the other efficiently stabilised her condition, sealing off the severed stump of her leg with the bluish gloop used for field containment. That was just a respite, a act which appeared charitable, before they installed a field jack to the back of her neck, sliding the blade-like device between vertebra, where it split the spinal cord between C4 and C5, the complex device tying itself to both ends of the severed cord, where it took over the maintenance of the autonomous functions. Oh, yes, they were crude compared to the TSEAP, their parent technology, but they physically isolated the brain from the rest of the body, and so could even be used to incapacitate Blanks, and they kept the prisoner alive. As long as their heart could physically beat, and their lungs breathe, they would. They had their role.

Now she was truly a prisoner in her own body, not even able to truly scream as the jack kept her breathing steady.

"Subject is secured. Isolating before Command can deploy to extract memories."

Oh, they were _good_.

~'/|\'~

Asuka Langely Soryu was brilliant, even if she had to admit it herself. Which she did, often without prior provocation. Several times a day. However, in this case, as she swung the plasmathrower around, carving notable tunnels into the mountainsides of Iceland, melting the igneous rocks and the Migou forces that stood on them, it could be argued that, by all reasonable definitions, it was literally true. Certainly, she was bright enough, once again in a literal sense. Her other weapons, the smaller integral ones, now fired autonomously, the targeting LAIs once again with data now that she could rely on her short-range sensor systems. She turned her head, and the dual charge beams mounted there cored a Fireant. That seemed to be the last of that group.

A few (very large) steps, and she was across the valley, footprints dug into the rock. Down one end the NEG forces which had been moved up to support Nero, largely armoured vehicles such as the Vreta and a number of Nazzadi mecha, were holding off the Migou forces, but they were having a tough time of it. The superheavies, the Mantises and the Spiders were disproportionately common, and, frankly speaking, the tanks were outnumbered and outgunned. The Migou had landed a Drone Ship, which had got past Units 00 and 01 (and, yes, Shinji had apologised sufficiently, in her opinion; Rei most certainly had not), and it was landing its full complement of troops, quickly and efficiently spreading out from under the cover of the nine hundred metre vessel, its underside breaking open like a split ribcage, to effectively served as a fortress.

A squadron of Type-207 tanks swept their way up the valley, trying to follow her, the quad HAL-7 laser cannons spewing out near-ultraviolet (and fairly ultraviolent) death into the advancing Migou forces. The systems on Unit 02 projected the passage of their shots against the inside of the entry plug as a purple line, calculating their position from the scattering against the dust and emfog, still outside the human visible spectrum. Asuka paused for a second as she bent to leap, and still found the time to be amused that laser weapons, thanks to systems such as this which were standard in armoured vehicles, actually did leave a visible trail.

Then she was into the air again, AT-Field flaring _She had yawned into her drink. They really weren't __getting anywhere, doing things like this._ for a brief second as she smashed through a Spinner dropship, the bulk of Unit 02 and its unnatural emanation tearing cleanly through the domed, doomed flying saucer in half without any resistance, before the earth rose to meet her. This was not, sadly, a metaphor or any other use of poetic license.

From out of sight, scout [body-form/individuals] in stealthed Dragonfly reconnaissance units provided guidance for the rest of their [body-form/network], mounted in Wasps; heavily-armed artillery units. They had been dropped before the Drone Ship had landed, and had flown in, taking up positions above the battlefield. From the NEG's perspective, one of the greatest threats about the Migou was the fact that they had their reconnaissance units integrated at the tactical level, seemingly possessing instantaneous access to the data that the Dragonflies gathered. But they didn't truly understand the way that [body-form/networks] worked, not really. They brushed around the edge of the truth, but could not understand it.

As a result, when multiple wings of Wasps, guided through the emfog and battlefield jamming through by their forwards scout-selves, opened up, all targeting Unit 02, this was a non-negligible issue.

The Wasp (another example of the terracentric nature of the New Earth Government; the Migou would rather have called it a [Terrestrial Planet Combat] [Long Range] [Individual Artillery Support Unit] [Containment/Sterilisation] variant, for the NEG naming scheme actually merged multiple similar craft) was a fat, bulbous thing, laden down with armour, and targeting and sensory equipment for the launch systems that gave it its role. It was, in fact, vaguely wasp-shaped, hence the name, but only in that it possessed vaguely insectoid legs which it used when stabilising itself in a launch, the sensors, when fully spread-out were akin to wings, and that some of the more common variants possessed a tail-mounted weapon, in the same sense that the Chalybion did. Their sole role was as missile pads, for rocketry was one area that the Migou were far ahead of the NEG. Their missiles were smart; vicious barbs of Migou construction material with disturbingly low thermal signatures and nasty manoeuvrability, that somehow managed to communicate with each other and their launch vehicle, and with the forwards scouts guiding them in, through all but the most intense emfog, and which, without exception possessed their own counter-measure systems. Worse; they learned, data from each one fed back to each other, to the launch vehicle, to the pilot's [body-form/network], and to the other forces in the area. In a sense, a Migou missile barrage was not so much a salvo of warheads as it was the release of a cluster of kamikaze pilots, who knew their goal but were permitted to find their own way to do it; the only limit their fuel capacity, as they were too small for A-Pods.

However, the problem was not the conventional missile systems. Well, the _main_ problem was not the conventional missile systems. The big problem, from the viewpoint of Unit 02 and its pilot, was that Wasps were loaded for sterilisation and containment; to hold the line, no matter what they faced. And so, mixed in with the missile barrage, were warheads with roughly four and a half milligrams of metalic antihydrogen contained within a perfectly spherical arcanomagnetic field of uniform strength. This same technology was used in the larger missiles used by the void craft, the technologies of the arcane a blessing when it came to containment of the volatile substance. Each one of these ones, slightly smaller than the pre-fragmentation warheads of the ones that carried submunitions, had, ignoring the energy wasted in useless neutrinos, the same yield as of roughly eighty tonnes of conventional explosives. Each Wasp carried three of these, in a heavily shielded component designed to survive a small nuclear blast, and be capable of reaching orbit on its own, where they could be safely contained. And the Adjunct of Deployed Strategic Reserves had authorised their use on this mission with more permissive parameters than others may have; alerted by the suspicions of the Archivist of Dangerous Pasts that there were more {THREATS} than the {SLEEPER IN FIRE} alone present.

The three entities which had already destroyed multiple [Terrestrial Planet Combat] [Local Supremacy Craft] and [Terrestrial Planet Combat] [Deployment Craft] were certainly threats to the mission and hazardous to the capital ships, if not {THREATS} or {HAZARDS} in their own right.

Asuka landed and stumbled, almost falling on a ground which was no longer that which she or the Evangelion had expected it to be, while her laser point-defence grid sliced through the air, swatting for missiles which were actively trying to evade, the data on the laser scattering from the watching Dragonfies interpreted by the projectiles and used to try to evade the seeking light. Despite the best efforts of the outmatched LAI systems in the defence-grid, missiles got through, shaped charges detonating against the thick plate of the Type-D and explosive submunitions bursting like rain. Inside the entry plug, the impacts muted to dull thuds, the girl growled, and sprang to the right, left arm instinctively raised as an ineffectual shield against the smart swarm of explosives. Forgoing any attempt to stay with the following tanks, the Evangelion advanced through the swarm-barrage, laser-grid sweeping through the sky trying to swat the insects wearing at the Unit.

"I'm not going to let Rei hold the record for most capships," Asuka roared, straining forwards in her seat as the behemoth broke into a sprint, directly towards the landed Drone Ship, ignoring petty things like "terrain" and "capable of supporting the weight of an Evangelion". The terrain just had to support her for _long enough_ for the next step, leaping from patch of ground to patch of ground, zig-zagging to confuse the Migou missiles with rapid changes in direction that nearly slammed her into the walls of the plug.

It helped, certainly, but the sheer volume of fire that multiple wings of Wasps could throw out, assisted by the systems mounted on the Drone Ship, meant that she was slowly being whittled down, layers of ablative armour stripped away and digging into the first layer of hardened plating.

"Misato! I'm getting swamped here! Argh! There are tonnes!"

The message didn't even make it back to HQ, so dense was the emfog and the infowar around the Migou vessel; an environment so electromagnetically heavy that infantry would have started suffering ill effects. The microwaves being thrown out in direct line of sight of the Drone Ship were cooking what little vegetation existed up here, and was melting the ice in the area, newborn rivers formed from melting snow springing to life.

The four waves of missiles had just been a test, to see what the entity had, and what kind of defences it had. On the discovery that it just seemed to have a NEG naval laser-defence grid, there was only a moment of hesitation, as the Migou on the field experienced what, to a human, would be akin to perplexed shock, the feeling of stepping on a stair which was not there, before the next salvo began, a single antihydrogen warhead hidden among the swarm which was, really, nothing more than decoys for the main missile.

By purest chance, the laser-grid system of Unit 02, overwhelmed by the targets presented to it, happened to hit the first antihydrogen warhead fairly early, the continuous-beam laser slicing through the missile and destabilising the arcanomagnetic containment field.

The inevitable happened.

~'/|\'~

Shinji swept the plasmagun over to the next set of targets prioritised by the onboard computers, the LAI part of the firecontrol minutely adjusting the arcanomagnetic sheaf around each bolt to hit precise targets within the cone of fire. There were so many of them now; the sky was filled with projected laser paths of the weapons on both NEG and Migou aircraft, as well as the gratuitous amounts of antimissile defence being thrown around by air and specialist ground units (and Unit 01 wasn't exactly negligent in adding to the lightshow). The system was even displaying who was responsible for the fire, by comparing the wavelength of the scattering with the known values of systems used by both sides.

He benightedly realised that the Migou were probably doing the same, that Unit 01 stood out like a sore thumb with the laser-grid, and that they were almost certainly using it to target him further.

He raised the point with Rei, as Units 01 and 00 advanced, moving together as the Test Model protected the already-damaged Prototype. The targets were getting scarcer for the Rei Gun, as the Migou Swarm Ships stopped their decent, and actually rose, pulling back, letting the Drone Ships take the fire. Rei had made attempts at the higher shots, but dispersion of the charged protons, as the spatially discontinuous arcanomagnetic field weakened meant that she was not getting the kills in one shot, often merely (at least according to her narration) damaging them. And, far above, bright torches in the night sky, were the two warships, fusion drives holding them high, tail pointed towards Earth. They seemed to be waiting for something.

"I thought that the MBAMCIGA-2 and 'Rei Gun' would be more of a contributing factor in making us a target," said Rei calmly, inverted commas audibly clicking around the informal name for her charge beam. "It is possible that the laser defence grid may play a role; however, it would be preferable that mine were still functional. Capacitors charged. Cooling cycle still in process." She paused. "The levels of coolant in the internal liquid helium reservoir have reached critically low levels. The integral D-Dump is still operational, but both yield and firing rate will suffer adversely when the weapon is depleted; in addition, the risks of catastrophic failure are greatly increased."

A static picture of Misato appeared in the bottom corner of the viewscreen, the words **[VOICE ONLY**] prominent under the picture. "Just a little longer," she said. "The Herald is almost there."

"The levels of coolant in the internal liquid helium..." repeated Rei, before the Major interrupted her.

"Yes, I know. I heard."

"Oh."

Shinji felt a sudden spike of pain, like a momentary touch from a too hot plate, and flinched, the aim of the plasma minigun dropping, leaving glassed craters across the mountainside. Turning, he saw a streak across the right arm of the Evangelion glowing white-hot, a gash that just looked wrong against his (no, not his, the Evangelion's, he reminded himself) body. The systems LAI tagged a box around it, warning of hostile charge beams, but the lack of training (and what there had been had been largely focussed around the necessities of engaging Herald-class entities, rather than the Migou) compared to the other pilots showed, when, rather moving quickly, he merely turned, enough for the next shot from the [body-form/network] of the Soldier of Necessary Actions to be aimed at the front of the shoulder-mounted missile pods, rather than their more heavily armoured sides.

The next thing Shinji knew, he was on the ground, the bulk of the Evangelion sprawled out. He blinked, heavily, shaking his head as the lights on the walls of the entry plug swam and danced in strange circle. His right eye ached, as if someone had just punched it; he was sure that he could feel it swelling already, the LCL cool against the heated flesh.

Rei's portrait appeared on screen, the mouth of the static image moving to her words, but all he could hear was a dull . The boy stared at the two images of the pale girl before his eyes, uncomprehending, waiting for the two images to re-merge before he could even think of... well, thinking the Evangelion back up.

He could feel the earth beneath the Evangelion pulse, even through the insulation of the LCL that surrounded him, and the noise through the haze that filled his ears. Misato's portrait joined Rei's. He tried to focus.

"... the beam penetrated the hull and..."  
"Shinji! Get up!"  
Another spike of pain, this time in his right leg.  
"passed through the main D-Engine and one of the main A-Pod clusters."  
"Shinji! Damn it! Listen to me, you need to get up!"  
Ritsuko's portrait appeared.  
"Your synch ratio has fallen below 50%. You must focus, or..."  
In the front of the entry plug, he saw, as the haze over his vision faded, Unit 00, wrapped in the clouds of the venting coolant, run out, bulky charge beam still held in both hands.  
"The target will not be capable of continued flight, and its main weapon systems..."  
"Listen, Shinji! You're a sitting duck there! Get to your feet, or... at least try to roll a bit...  
"No! Don't roll! You'll crush the minigun!"  
"... are offline. It is advised that land forces try to secure the..."  
Unit 00 covered the distance in a few long strides, leaping to one foot before bringing the other around in a half-circle which sent the Mantis, twenty metres tall itself, flying, its front caved in. The Evangelion paused there for less than a second, still wrapped in the clouds of still-cold helium that enveloped it and left it glittering with ice crystals, before sprinting on. It looked like Rei, denuded of almost all her integrated weapons, her armour heavily cracked with a crystalline blackness visible underneath, and her charge beam still cooling down, was going to try to kick the Migou forces to death.  
"Better a crushed weapon than dead!"  
He took a deep gasp of LCL, and through the aching in his skull, concentrated deeply on the concept of getting up, of pulling himself to his feet.  
"The two won't be that different if it happens!"  
"...crash site, *-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-*," Rei finished, transmission interrupted by the fractured light of the AT-Field shining around her as she tore through a pair of Spiders, the sussuration of the communications static whispering in his ear as the barrier interrupted the transmission, causing Unit 01 to lose her signal.

Unit 01 pulled itself to its feet, hunched low. Shinji spared a glance; his right shoulder (no, the Eva's, he reminded himself), was a mess, the armour plating flayed away and covered in the organism's blood, which ran down his arms and dripped to the ground. The image was... funny, all along the right side of his vision, even through the pain in his eye.

"Good, Shinji!" called out Misato. "Go, help Rei!"

"Listen to me, Shinji," said Ritsuko, intensely. "Unit 01 took a hit directly to the the rocket pods on the right shoulder. They're meant to blow out safely, but the charge beam moves faster than the explosion, and so, when the angle and path it took is taken into account, the hole it left meant that, quite apart from the impact, you were essentially hit with a shaped charge to the head as all the rockets left cooked off at once."

"Huh," was about all he could manage, as he groggily swung the plasma minigun around, onto the mass of targets. "What's... up with..."

"I haven't finished," she interrupted, the lag in the transmission enough that it led to such things. "Both the shoulder and the head have taken non-negligible damage. The Unit is blind in one eye, and the armour in both locations is severely impaired. The entry plug display isn't purely a visual subvert system, but you're going to get a noted loss in resolution and a slight image lag on the right half of the screen. Now that the Migou know about this issue, you're going to have to use all your rockets, and..." she paused, "Try not to get hit any more; use your AT-Field!"

Rockets. Missiles. Whatever. Yes. That was something he could do, he thought, as the aiming profile for the missiles came up, the yellow box in the centre of his viewscreen.

_It really is like some kind of computer game, isn't it?_ he thought, as the second red box closed around the already-recognised hostiles. The thud of the first-stage booster, kicking the missiles out of the launch tubes in order, fired slightly upwards before arcing down to was not noticed by the boy, as Unit 01 began to sprint too. The Prototype stood alone, the crystalline radiance of fractured space-time flaring intermittently as Rei only added to the destructive nature of her kicks and stomps. The salvo began to impact, as the indicators on the left shoulder blinked red, a counterpoint to the red glows covering the shoulder and part of the head on the display

"You are functional," said Rei calmly, as a Fireant was punted into a mountainside. "That is optimal. It was uncertain. Eliminate these forces so that I may take the next shot."

Asuka's portrait joined Rei's; the older woman shrinking so that they took up no more space than one had. There was some kind of crackle, through which her voice could be recognised, but not understood.

"What was that?" said Shinji distractedly, trying to split his attention between the traces of her voice that got through the static, and trying to direct plasma fire into the contacts all over the wall of the entry plug.

The world was, just for a second, cast into sharp relief. Before his eyes, slowly, a fireball inched its way above the mountainside to his front. And then, seconds later, the shockwave hit, nothing to the twin behemoths.

"Antihydrogen," said Rei, clinically. " 4.837 miligrams of it, to four significant figures. The Migou have decided that we are hazardous to their end goal. It was used against the Second Child. Such an omnidirectional blast is such that, if it were at very close proximity, it could seriously damage, or, considering the damage that Unit 02 has already taken, potentially destroy an Evangelion."

Something snapped inside Shinji, then, some outpouring of inner hatred and frustration.

_I don't even want to be here! I don't want to be used as a weapon! I don't want to be shot at by fishmen or bugs or crazy cultists or anything! And now you bugs show up like this with so many ships and mecha and _antimatter_. You're not even meant to be here! And my eye and shoulder actually really hurt... as in really! Argh!  
_

_I am going to kill you all! All of you! So now you won't be here!_

"Very enthusiastic, Third Child," said Rei, "but it was not necessary to exclaim that at such a volume, especially with such inelegance. Firing." The charge beam roared.

The words failed to have any calming effect, as roaring, Shinji and Unit 01 together sprinted towards the nearest concentration of forces. The harsh light cast by the plasma minigun swayed and spun as he spun from target to target, casting crazed shadows of over the terrain in burning white and night-blackness, interspersed with the fabricated unreality of the shimmers of the Guard of Yog Sothoth.

The Soldier of Necessary Actions, four of its [body-form/individuals] already dead (including its back-up on the ship, dead with the vessel, so it risked permanent death,) decided that such a threat demanded that there be survivors to report it. This was major; vital. A potential THREAT. It pulled back its surviving components of its [body-form/network] from the roaring beast, the dreadful sound most akin the scream of a drowning man, and advised other forces in the area to do the same. This was beyond them. They needed capital support to deal this this kind of target, at the very least. The Migou forces began a disciplined withdrawal, sacrificing [body-form/individuals] to ensure that as many [self-form/individuals] survived, as Unit 01 tore through their forces, roaring as the plasma weapon reaped its toll through their ranks like wheat.

Rei stared blankly at the image of the receding Unit 01 on the inside of her entry plug. Her face was lit in red by the warning signals that spoke of the massive damage she had experienced earlier, and now, and of the critical lack of coolant in the charge beam. "Hit," she said, but there was something gone from her voice, some vital spark that others would not have thought had been there and which was only noticed by its absence. "As it was always going to be. So must it be. Always."

~'/|\'~

The _Weny Komdy_, what was left of her body lifted in one arm by the figure (and they really weren't in power armour, she was sure) that had the impossibility of a hand-held laser weapon, was carried back up to the top of the house, then carried down a hidden ladder, down underground. Her attempts to kick with the one remaining leg did nothing; there was no motor control. She was nothing more than a limp ragdoll, with a head attached to the top.

There was no pain, thanks to the Creator-made stimulants automatically administered by her piloting suit, but, nevertheless, it was purest hell.

There was a room down here, at the foot of the ladder, obviously of Dagonite origin. The decorations were intact, though somewhat scorched from laser fire and riddled with bullets; the remains of the previous inhabitants had been piled in a corner. The sleek thin shape of a modern NEG computer, about the size of a credit card, lay on the desk, connected to the pre-existing computer, fan whirring, which had probably been several technological generations out of date when the nano-factory had been invented. The three that had killed her entire squad and taken her like this, lay her down in the middle of the floor; she could still move her eyes, at least to see that there was at least one more, dressed the same, and... she would have taken a sharp breath, had the field jack not controlled her breathing, keeping it steady. The last of her Oyanari was in the room, closed up and active, crude plating strapped to the front, right over where the head of the pilot would have gone.

She could already guess what they'd done. They had EMP grenades, and they had those (impossible) lasers. They'd obviously ambushed the first pair, one of the suits wrecked with the plasma weapon (and then they'd used it as an explosive trap), and the second powered armour had been more precisely fried, the outer hull cut through in a way that killed the pilot, but kept the suit intact enough for them to use, with a little repair work.

The armour spoke, over the loudspeakers, in the dominant language used by the NEG. "Foxtrot 813 status report. The salvaged power armour is capable of operating at 71% capacity. Repairs have been made to the damage inflicted, although they remain suboptimal, and a standard power armour OS has been installed over the top of the pre-existing Loyalist one. It is likely that this is a standard field unit, as it uses logical progressions from AW1 equipment, rather than the Migou-pseudohuman designs seen in operation among elite Loyalist forces."

"Acknowledged, Foxtrot 813. Position yourself at the entrance. Ensure that no hostiles are permitted access to this location."

"Acknowledged. Foxtrot 813 moving to new position."

The stolen Oyanari then moved, with a certain familiarity that suggested that the pilot, whoever it was, was familiar with both _nazzadi_, and the derivative craft used by the traitors who had betrayed the Creators, armour.

_Weny Komdy_ Hikary flicked her eyes back to the figures that stood around her. She had been taught a few words of _englisi_, back in the revolving Hamilton cylinder in the asteroid belt where she had been decanted and trained in both fast-time simulated space as well as the 1-g environment of the cylinder, before being shipped to Sol Three. All but one of the figures in their shifting armour, not true stealth, but enough that a glance might miss them, had stayed; one had followed the stolen armour. Eighteen eyes stared back at her, nothing of the _nazzadi_ in the armoured helms.

She tried to talk to them, to explain that she wasn't going to talk, and they should just kill her... although she blanched somewhat at the idea, like this, tied up and crippled, with no control over her own body, but she couldn't. She wasn't even sure if was due to the thing they had used to steal her body from her, or just sheer terror.

Pathetically, she just hoped that the thing maintained bladder and bowel control. She had no clue if it did, and, actually, the combat suit would deal with it, but it seemed like so little to ask for.

"Orpheus Command, this is Kantaya-13. We have secured another target for extraction."

_Sufiki contrignosy!_ she wanted to yell. Did they think that their communications would really work here, underground, when just the building above had been enough to cut the _nazzadi_ in their true powered armour, able to throw a D-Engine behind their transmissions?

_understood_

The voice came from all around, a hollow whisper that felt as if it echoed within the skull.

_orpheus deploying as requested_

The lights above flickered, and the radio in Hikary's combat suit flickered to life, filled with waves of sussurating static. But it shouldn't have done that. They'd crippled it... hadn't they?

A figure stepped into view from the left of the trapped _nazzadi_ woman's vision.

It was best described as a figure. It certainly couldn't be called a person. Part of one, maybe, but certainly not a whole one.

Viscera, at roughly the height it should be, hovering in mid-air.

No lungs, but there was part of a heart, beating steadily despite its incomplete structure.

A few slivers of bone; a spinal chord without a spine. A fine, transparent network of nerves.

Slivers of flesh sketching out part of a human body, pale as a dead meat drained of its blood and prepared for slaughter, devoid of skin.

Metal, snaking into the mess, weaving through the spinal chord and into the faceless mask that the presence wore, if wore was the right word for the way that it sat, almost clamped to the terrifying figure, moving as it it were the thing's head.

These were only impressions. That was all that there could be. A true description could only be given with recourse to an anatomy textbook and a taste for the macabre.

That was what it reminded her of. Back in the facility where she had been decanted, she had seen two workers, supervised by one of the Creators, remove a child who hadn't grown properly; the skin hadn't taken. It was like that, but unutterably worse, because that at least had been still, a dead failure. The figure that stalked towards her was _alive_ and it was _moving_ and it _should not be_.

The _nazzadi_ screamed and screamed and screamed, but all came out were the steady breaths, perhaps altered by the contortions of her vocal chords, if she could even do that. She didn't care. She screamed in her head, to drown out the whispering.

The lights flicked as the thing bought a hand that was little more than a pinkish mist wrapped around the spider thread-like nerves, in which a few tiny fragments of flesh floated, into contact with the _nazzadi_ woman's forehead.

_She deployed with her squad, charging out of the armoured cover of the Drone Ship._

_She was buffeted by the horrific acceleration that the Creators imposed on them, lungs heavy, head feeling faint, colours fading to grey._

_She watched as Kora was cut down by the beast, and, screaming, charged at it, hyperedged claws ripping and tearing at the engorged intestines of the monster._

_She moved through the long-abandoned ruins of a city somewhere in Asia, cutting down the degenerate anfrazzadi cultists, as, above her head, the vessels of the Creators swatted the flying monsters out of the air._

_She lay in Kora's arms, on board the ship as they orbited high above the earth, merely a brief __transfer to another group of Creator forces, for redeployment. She tilted her head around, and kissed him in that little patch where his neck met his ribcage._

She watched helplessly, filled with terror, as a shadowy figure, visible _through_ the abomination of flesh, only waist-high, slowly took took steps forwards. But it didn't matter. Kora would be here soon, wherever here was.

_She felt her system flood with adrenaline, as the hatch open and stood on the surface of Sol Three, the world that would be theirs, for the first time, staring out over the snow-covered ground to the city-base where she would be stationed._

_She paced through the dark ship, the night vision of her kind making it possible to see where she was going._

_She watched behind her as the cylinder receded from view, heading for an unknown future._

_She punched, she kicked, she punched,she kicked, until the routines of Hun Zuti were as second nature, in this strange virtual world the Creators had built._

_She opened her eyes for the first time, lungs filled with fluid. She did not scream. That reflex had been suppressed._

She was no more.

The eyes of the sixty kilograms of flesh and bone rolled back, neurons fried, soul devoured.

_memories extracted,_ whispered the figure. _orpheus task completed._

The abomination of flesh fell apart, disintegrating into ashes which slowly fell to the ground, before disappearing.

The Replica Elite cut the throat of the hollow shell, adding a Loyalist to the pile of Dagonite corpses who had already been extracted. There would be more.

~'/|\'~

_The_ thing _had torn the woman apart. It hadn't even moved. It hadn't needed to. It had other recourses._

_Of course, if it happened to _the _bitch,_

Glimmering. Sparkling. Wrapped all around her.

_she would not have mourned her._

_Arrogant idiot. What was she, stupid?_

_The Type 1 would never have worked safely, despite her protests. And look what had happened._

An all enveloping mesh of broken diamond and strange reflection. Tighter than a mother's grasp, as if it were part of herself, or maybe she were a part of it.

_A man had sat down beside her, his normally neatly-trimmed beard shaggy from not having been home in over a week, and not having slept in two days. He too had been nursing a drink. He had seen it too._

_They had drunk the drinks. Then the next ones. Then the next ones, ethanol washing away the memories_

There were things outside. Here, she was safe.

"_You were right," he had said. "We can't just use their principles straight off; we're dealing with a completely different mind. God, if we hadn't just rushed it, if we'd just ignored her and tested it properly._

However, they were not. They were right to be scared of her. She was going to do something that they'd never seen before. Something that no-one had ever seen before.

"_And you know _all _about minds," she had said, slurring her words slightly. "I just don't fucking care right now. Save it for the reports, when the slut has to justify why she pushed ahead despite our warnings."_

_"Too true," he had said. "Listen..._

They thought they could kill her.

"_... are you doing anything. There's something," he raised an eyebrow suggestively, "we could do something more fun to forget, rather than just getting drunk."_

Hah.

_She had subconsciously smoothed down her clothing. She had been aware that she smelt of sweat and of beer and of cleaning chemicals and... other things. But he had smelt the same. And he had been there too. He had seen it happen, too._

It was going to be the other way around. For certain. She raised the plasmathrower, and grinned a predatory grin. It was appropriate, after all. The bugs were all about to die, and _nothing_ that they could do was going to stop her.

"_Sure. Why not."_

"My go, Migou," she said, flicking on the external speakers, the voice booming across the valley.

And there was light.

~'/|\'~

The data that the Magi, back in London-2, were receiving was sparse, necessarily limited by the available bandwidth, especially since the NEGN had clamped down on the stealth satellites, terrified that the Migou might be able to detect the slight atmospheric scattering inherent to the tightbeam lasers that permitted the link between the flotilla and the satellites, picking up what transmissions from the Evangelions which got through the emfog.

"We're only getting a max of 3.2 Mbps," reported Maya, hands flying through the katas of control, cable snaking from the back of her exposed Direct Magi Interface to the seat behind, "they've cut us even further." She made a disgusted noise. "I've cut all attempts at video feed, we can get that from the Evas when they're back, and we need the data more than we need pictures. Uh, if that's okay with you, doctor," she added, hurriedly.

Ritsuko waved a hand. "Fine, fine." She gnawed on a fingernail, removing it from her mouth and balling her hand to prevent her from doing it, when she realised that. "Now, what on earth is happening with the Evas!" she demanded of the room, packed with electronics and computers and cables and suspension couches and, in the middle of all of this, Magi operators.

"Unclear," answered Nara, his dark face twisted with worry. "I'm getting blips from feed... yeah, uh, yes, that's an AM gamma spike." He paused for a fraction of a second. "Seismics?"

"Unclear, with all the eruptions, but we've got a large blast... 0.07 to 0.1 kilotonnes... that is a valid ballpark for their tactical AM weapons," answered Cela, voice dispassionate.

"Yes, it is," added Sosily, red eyes glinting. "Link to previous uses dispatched."

"Signals from Evangelions?"

"Maintained. Data stream cut from Oh-Two matches that of strong AT-Field... yes, that's confirmed with squirt."

"Report on status."

"Data sent."

"Evangelion 02... status intact. Weapons feed indicates actively in combat; interruptions characteristic of frequent use of AT-Field."

Ritsuko removed her arglasses, and massaged her eyes, before putting them back on. It gave her time to think. The Migou were making use of antimatter weapons now. And it was somewhat headache-inducing listening to the conversations of the Magi operators, as they responded a little _too_ quickly to track properly, flowing datasets and internal worlds on their hard-contacts beyond that which she could keep up with. Even if she were to use her obsolete spinal ports, they wouldn't come with the level of integration that this new generation of operators (and they were a new generation; fresh-faced youngsters, mostly recruited by the Foundation straight out of their first degrees or from military data analysis roles) enjoyed. Spinal ports only subverted the nervous system. The DMI, and the newer generations of the related technology from the Achtzig Group that were starting to be in the Ashcroft Foundation and in the high echelons of the New Earth Government interfaced the mind with the machine, the self with the shell.

In fact, in these data-handling matters like this, she was almost redundant; her presence there akin to the cerebrum in cerebellal tasks.

_But they still need me for my mind,_ she thought viciously. _I'm the one who does the higher level reasoning, not them._ It was a shameful thought, but it was true. That was something that the Magi couldn't do for the Foundation, despite what her mother would have liked.

One of the other Magi operators... the new one, Ritsuko recalled, the one who was replacing Oliva, popped up, her face projected against the arglasses the doctor wore, unlike the hard contacts and optical jacks so common among the technical staff of Project Magi and universal for the operators.

"Dr Akagi?" Penny asked, who, despite the fact that her name ended in a 'y', was not a Nazzadi. It wasn't as bad as that which Clara (as a male amlati) and Maya (as a human female) experienced; at least the name matched the gender. "I'm getting something... funny on Unit 02. Link provided."

"No," Ritsuko said, a hint of annoyance in her voice, "explain what you see. I want to see what made you think it was worth bringing to my attention, rather than relying on me to decide whether it matters. If I wanted that, I'd go get one of Sylveste's idiot machines."

Maya snorted. Like that would be the day. The doctor had made her feelings on the Achtzig Group clear on previous occasions; they were remarkably similar to her feelings on the Engel Group.

Of course, come to think of it, she _had_ asked for help from the Engel Group.

Maya shook her head, an odd-feeling, swaying motion as the cable trailed behind her, and got back to her task.

"Well... um, if we track the synchronisation ratio, it suddenly just skyrocketed. Just as the Second Child activated the AT-Field to defend against the AM blast."

"Well, isn't that just the effects of the AT-Field, surely? We have tracked the fact that the AT-Field is to a certain extent self-reinforcing."

"Yes, I did think that at first. I did a paper on the known manifestations of this... well, it was a sorcerous phenomenon when I wrote it, because this was before," she tapped the ceramic plating that replaced part of her skull, "I joined the Project. But the shape is wrong, from what I've been shown, and from what the Children displayed during the training you had me monitor."

Ritsuko sighed. "AT-Fields only seem to exist to screw up hypotheses. Send it over."

She scanned the graph, expanding it to fill the projection on her glasses, and her face paled.

"Berserk!" she managed through numb feeling lips. "It went berserk... just for a few seconds... but it is _identical_ to what Unit 01 did against Asherah!"

The reactions from the Magi Operators to this announcement were about what might be expected. Specifically, that the ones recruited from academia started throwing out hypotheses to try to explain it, splitting their attention despite the fact that their work-rate barely dipped, while the ones with military training (albeit nothing from the frontlines), such as Maya, continued to work, taking over the slight dip in productivity almost instantaneously.

"Self-preservation," suggested Cela, confidently. "It matches all previous examples."

"There is only _one_ previous example," snapped July, the somewhat unfortunately-named _amlati_ (there was already an August, a somewhat lazy, but benevolent, and so directly opposed to her in almost every way), her eyes narrowed. "You certainly can't make that kind of statement with that kind of confidence."

"It's true that Cela overestimated the evidence..." began Clara, the other male _amlati_, his purple eyes almost pleading.

"... you mean he extrapolated from almost no evidence at all," retorted July. "It's exceptionally annoying when people try to push their hypotheses as theories."

"No, no, no," whispered Ritsuko, "it's not that. It may quite well be self-preservation that would trigger that..."

Cela smirked at July, who merely glared back, orange eyes promising revenge.

"... but that's not the point. The point is that the EFCS Type-2 shouldn't permit that. That's why we used it for the MP Model, and Unit 01 is the Prototype." She slumped down, head in hands. "You know, we're going to have to run another full immersion data dive on the blackbox, just as we did for Unit 01."

There were groans all around.

"Should we do anything, doctor?" asked Maya, gingerly. "Anything else, I mean?"

The older woman sighed. "I am going to take those monster apart when they get back. Yes," she said, louder, "yes, actually. I want all three Units shipped back to L2 in full ACXB hazard containment. 01 and 00 are going to need it anyway, from the damage, but I don't trust 02 now. If it's going to do things like that... I don't like it. It's always been the most predictable and reliable of the three, before."

~'/|\'~

Fire fell down from the heavens, great newborn suns bought into nascent flaring life for one purpose; their own extinction. Through a moment that was an eternity, confined by arcane fields of magnetism that limited them, constrained them, and prevented their dispersion, they fell. Some might have compared them to figurative fallen angels, but, in truth, their function was to suppress the rising ape.

Far below, the stream of lesser stars cut off, no longer licking out to consume anything it could touch. Instead, a cloud of superheated gas and excreta rose, lit from below by the hellish glow of molten rock. The Swarm Ship did not cease its fire, however, the supercoolant carrying the heat radiated by the now-extinguished star away from the mechanisms of the ventral plasma cannon, and readying it for another shot.

In these kind of circumstances, it did not pay to make foolish assumptions and believe-without-evidence that such a capital grade threat was destroyed.

And it was not the only one doing it. From the heavens, the Swarm Ships unleashed their suns, while the Drone Ships and the destruction they wrought could not be seen by human or Deep One eyes, the ultraviolet lasers scoring their way across the landscape and cutting through the emfog that drifted on the winds that blew from the west, the micromachines slagged, briefly visible as tiny fireflies before they vanished forever as vapour.

Shinji threw himself to the left again as another impact thundered against the earth, the blastwave felt twice (once against the legs of the Evangelion, and once as a shift in the LCL) in a way which was rather disconcerting. He had seen what those things could do, seen the white-hot craters chewed out of the volcanic rock glowing in the dark, while above them fungoid clouds blossomed and molten rock rained down from the heavens.

The MBAMCIGA-2 was lying in a slagged pool of rock, somewhere back there. That had been far, far too, close; he had felt the wash of heat _through_ the LCL, seen the ceramics on the front of the Evangelion glow cherry red, felt the agony as the flesh in his shoulder and face blistered as the wounded Evangelion cooked.

At least it hadn't hurt as much as Mot had. He really hoped nothing ever would again.

The earlier rage was gone, replaced with a much more sensible (he felt) blend of terror and fear. And, yes, they may have been the same emotion, but that just showed how scary it was being shot at by proper enemy capital ships, when he was in something which might best be described as a capital grade power armour; much more able to dish out damage than take it. He was just running towards Asuka and Unit 02. He wasn't even sure where Rei was, his haphazard and instinctual evasions taking him away from...

The terrible noise of the Evangelion-scaled charge beam sounded out. There was a flash of light, which remained, expanding slightly, as it faded, far above.

_Well, she's still alive,_ he thought. _And the Rei Gun's still working._ It was a warm feeling inside, really, a mixture of hope and gratitude to know that at least they could do something against the figures above them.

Unit 01 picked up pace as it sprinted across this hell-torn landscape, almost dancing through the rain of fire from the sky.

Unit 02 huddled under the wreckage of the downed Drone Ship, surrounded by the melted remnants of what had been the best part of a brigade-equivalent of elite Migou forces. Above her, the underside of the ship stretched, slightly too low for her to stand upright, reaching in both directions. It had not been exactly hard to kill, in Asuka's opinion; they used hull material to form the ribcage-like structure that protruded from the underside of the ship and so effectively shielded the newly landed troops from counter-fire.

It was somewhat less efficacious against capital-grade mecha running underneath, even if they did have to stoop, and unleashing a frigate-grade reactor's worth of hot plasma into its guts. She had taken out its main A-Pod cluster on her first attempt, boring a tunnel, ringed by white-hot remnants of Migou construction material, into the thing. The fact that it had taken twelve more tries, even with the aid of her targeting overlays, to find enough of the distributed power grid on these things to actually cripple it, was in her opinion fully acceptable.

_I guess the bugs never, ever expected to come across something like Unit 02 on Earth,_ she thought smugly, trying to hide even from herself the desperation she felt as the blasts on the upper hull made the underside vibrate. Clouds of hot gas vented through the holes she had dug into it. There was the terrible noise of vaporised metal, as the damage, melting through the hull and only being stopped by the internal superstructure, started to tell, and the middle of the covered landing place started sagging.

As far as Asuka could see it, there were two choices here.

_I could wait here, and be crushed by the ship when it gives way, and then shot to pieces by the Migou, because the Evangelion would survive that, and I'm pretty sure they're not idiots. Or I could leave, and be shot to pieces by the Migou._

There were major drawbacks to either course of action. In fact, there was the same drawback. The "shot to pieces" bit, in fact, to labour on the same point.

If she died here, she was going to _kill_ Misato for getting her into this kind of mess and not getting the proper kind of support.

And... she didn't want to leave this ruined cover. She was probably going to die either way, so why not hang onto life a little longer? Why not stay here, where, even when the mutilated remnants of the ship she herself had killed collapsed onto her, at least would provide cover. Grasp extended life, one second at a time.

So, despite what she portrayed herself as to the world, despite what others would think that she would do, despite what she might have even been thinking after they'd used the antimatter weapon against her... she was staying here. It was suicide to go out, and if there was one instinct that lay in her heart (and indeed, she suspected, in all hearts), it was the desire not to die. She'd do anything to stop that.

She didn't want to die. It was that simple. Keep on pushing it away, one second per second.

A few hundred metres along the hull, there was an explosion as the ultraviolet laser of one of the Drone Ships above cut through the remnants of the vessel and into the rock below. The wall of the entry plug sketched the line of its passage in purple; not much wider than the lines produced by a laser grid, but much, much more intense.

Asuka took a deep, slightly shuddery breath of LCL.

_Okay._

Something smashed through the opposite wall of the cover, making the entire structure sag somewhat precipitously. The girl took a second to recognise it. It was Unit 01, but the top levels of armour were just gone. And the ones underneath it. In fact, the greyish-white hardplates were visible, the ablative armour fused and melted dribbles on its armour. Only one actinic eye gazed from the mask of the beast; the horn was torn off entirely, snapped at its base.

"Come on!" Shinji yelled at her.

"Why are you here?" she shouted back. "Do you know how much stuff is being shot at this thing?"

_What are you doing, idiot? It was only going to be me stuck here; now they can concentrate fire here, and you probably dragged more. Now you're endangering yourself, too!_

"Yes! I had to run through it!" he retorted. "Now come on!" He gulped down a mouthful of the liquid that enveloped him. "Asuka!"

"What?"

"You remember the training thing, yes?"

"Uh huh."

"Remember," he paused, "uh... 120-120-3?"

"No! Why should I!"

"The two charge beam ones?"

She frowned. "Oh, right. That was 140-140-3."

"Not the time! Remember the solution!"

Her face went blank for a second, then she grinned. "Right! Think you're up to it?"

He grinned back, the smile infectious. "I'd better be. They got the minigun... that hurt. That's about all I can do to help you two now."

Asuka frowned. "Where is Rei, anyway?"

Shinji winced. "Somewhere. I sort of got separated from her," he admitted. "But... well, the Rei Gun is still firing and stuff is still blowing up."

The far end of the ship began to sag; something not helped by the fact that Shinji reached up, and tore off one of the more intact panels of underhull, holding it above his head like a shield.

"Right," he said. "Okay."

"On the count of three," she countered.

"Okay. Deep breath. Stay close, I'll shield us as best I can. One."

"Two."

"Three," they shouted together, as together the Test Model and the Mass Production Model darted out of the cover, unwieldy section of hull held up by Unit 01, a weak AT-Field glimmering over its surface, synchronised together in their movements. The Migou units that had moved, on the ground, to surround the ruins of the ship, which sagged and twisted, were rather surprised.

And as the plasmathrower lit up the night again, Asuka smiled.

_Thank you, dummy._

_Thanks for coming for me._

~'/|\'~

The guns on the _Unity_ roared in a manner quite unlike the name of the ship, each one of the six 150mm coilguns operating independently, LAI systems controlling the precise movements of the weapon to the general instructions of the command crew, who were actually ensconced deep within the hull. The cigar-shaped ship, bombardment coilguns forming a spine along the top was surrounded by the exhaust plumes of missiles; both its own, and the Migou ones which railed down from the sky, and its laser defence grid could be seen, shining through the smoke. The lesser weapons merely added to the fire, anti-air weapons ensuring that any overly confident bug who tried to move into range of the battlegroup was soon to be departing the mortal coil. The destroyer itself was elevated from the water, A-Pods lifting its bulk in defiance of gravity, its ventral plasma cannon discharging suns, one every 1.7 seconds, though the efficacy was dubious. At this range, the sheer infowar and volumes of emfog were enough that it was hard to acquire a target, even when they were throwing plasma back at you (in a similarly inaccurate fashion; you were doing the same antignostic techniques to them, naturally).

Deep with the hull of the _Unity_ (actually named after one of the Nazzadi captains who had tried to crash her AW1-era picket ship into the Hive Ship at the start of the second Arcanotech War; the fact that it also meant something in English was a fortunate accident), the shift in pressure from a relatively nearby impact, vast volumes water flash-boiled in an instant could be felt, as the ship shifted slightly in the air. It did not matter; the crew were either in acceleration couches or operations exosuits, and the latter were magnetically clamped to the floor, the operator inside entrusting movement to the LAI, piloting it as opposed to wearing it.

"Target destroyed. New target data provided."

_Oh yes_, thought Lieutenant Yukwiny, the missile officer on the _Unity_. And then there was _them_.

The four specialists... yes, she was going to call them 'specialists'... had been moved onto the destroyer just before the operation had started. The orders were valid, and were confirmed by NEGN CATO Command, but there was a certain... a certain feel to them, in the way that they were written and the slightly stressed way in which they had been validated, that suggested that they had come from outside the normal chain of command. They certainly won't exactly orthodox.

Neither the orders nor the specialists, come to think of it.

They were clearly divided, too. Three of them were in what looked like heavy _Army_ combat armour, the blue-brown-grey-black of urban combat, of but the helmets looked nothing like the clear faceplated ones used in operations where danger wasn't expected, nor like the skull-like ones which were used in the kind of situation that grade of armour saw use. There was just this single, wide optical sensor that reached across the entire face. And they were just the technical staff; they sat at the commandeered stations as if they belonged there, talking in the flat mechanical voice of the external speakers on their armour, making them almost impossible to tell apart.

The other one, though... the one who actually seemed to be in charge, though she and her superiors had tried and failed to get a formal rank from the... Yukwiny was pretty sure that it was a woman, from the height, but the voice and the build were entirely masked by the even-heavier armour that she wore. And there was something terribly inhuman about the six eyes on her combat armour; about the way that they were the only features on the blank mask that obscured the visage.

And she talked constantly. A babble of coordinate locations and positions, to a nearly impossible precision with the levels of emfog, already high from their own bombardment, let alone the volumes that the Migou were seeding the place with.

The ship rocked more this time. That one must have been close, even with the evasive manoeuvres that the ship was pulling. That was one of the wonderful advantages of the A-Pod, compared to conventional craft; since the thruster was reactionless, there was no need to put it on the outside of the vehicle (though they still were on things like aircraft, where the added manoeuvrability was worth the vulnerability). In this Type-31-S Destroyer, the main A-Pod was instead inside the hull, which could be armoured uniformly. And when shots were getting this close, it was worth it.

"Lieutenant."

An AR window opened before her...the figure was staring right at her, those eyes...

Yukwiny shivered, and swallowed, unconsciously wetting her lips.

"Yes?"

"Inclination 089, azimuth 032, range 4.93 kilometres. Hostile Migou reconnaissance unit designate "Dragonfly". Destroy."

The window vanished, the armoured mask disappearing, and the Nazzadi woman breathed a sigh of relief. She was the missile officer, though... that wasn't actually her role.

It opened again.

"Disregard previous message. Message sent to wrong officer. Apologies," the figure said, in that flat voice which contained no real hint of apology. "New target: landed Drone Ship, 65°38'44.13" North, 18°05'36.39". Destroy."

The figure was gone again. Yukwiny gritted her teeth, and selected the appropriate strike for such a target, confirming with the ranged data from the _St. Petersburg_ that there actually was an appropriately shaped blob (damn those Drone Ships and their radar absorptive surfaces; when hugging the ground like they did when landed, they were very hard to target for a thing that was almost a kilometre long) on the ground there.

The salvo of missiles, an integrated mass of decoys, sensor-drones, anti-armour warheads, and the specialist anti-ship missiles, was vomited forth in a cloud from the ship, arcing up slightly before levelling off, the smart guidance systems aware that, in such an em-heavy environment, especially against the Migou, the best firing solution was one which bought them in low, hugging the ruins of the Dagonite city as best they could, while still retaining enough velocity to minimise acquisition by the Migou defences.

Turning in her acceleration couch, waiting for further orders, either from her proper command structure, or from the Army strangers on her ship, Yukwiny decided two things. Firstly, that she really didn't like the specialists, in their dehumanising armour (which wasn't even needed; why would they chose to wear it over a proper padded comms system? It wasn't like they were going to be boarded.).

And secondly, it had been bad enough when they weren't being briefed on what Nero was doing, there had been what looked to be teenagers in the briefing, and the Army Special Weapons Division, if they were to be believed, had apparently conjured an entire Corps from their arses, in direct contravention of their name. But this... the Dagonite nuclear weapons, the fact that they'd pressed the attack despite that, the fact that the Migou had shown up like this in a massive force, and _now_ the fact that these strangers were getting implausibly good targeting data against the Migou, no less...

This was downright suspicious.

...

And then it got worse.

~'/|\'~


	20. Chapter 16: CATOcyclsm: Cessation

**Chapter 16**

CATOcylsm: Cessation

~'/|\'~

_Although the motive came from within, the __**form**__ taken by the cult has appeared to many to be of non-Israelite origin. Babylonia and Assyria, however, seem to be out of the question: __**malik**__, "arbiter, decider," is there an epithet of various gods, and as an appellative means "prince" and not king; further, little evidence for the prevalence of human sacrifice has as yet been found in those lands (A. Jeremias, __**Das Alte Test. im Lichte d. alten Orients**__, 2nd ed., p. 454). Among the Canaanite branch, the king-god is more prominent, and apart from the Ammonite variant Milcom, numerous names compounded with Milk- are found on Phoenician inscriptions and among western Semites mentioned in cuneiform literature (H. Zimmern, __**Keilinschr. u. das Alte Test.**__, 3rd ed. pp. 470 sqq.). It is true that child-sacrifice in connexion with fire prevailed among the Phoenicians, and, according to the Greeks, the deity honoured with these grisly rites was Kronos (identified with the Phoenician El, "God"). On the other hand, the seat of the cult appears to have been at Jerusalem, and the period during which it flourished does not favour any strong Phoenician influence. Again, the form of the word Tophet and Ahaz's association with Damascus might point to an Aramaean origin for the cult; but it would not be safe to support this view by the statements and names in 2 Kings xvii. 31. On the whole, the biblical tradition that the Molech-cult was Canaanite and indigenous (Deut. xii. 29 sqq., xviii. 9 seq.) holds the ground. There was a tendency in time of misfortune to revert to earlier rites (illustrated in some ancient mourning customs), and it may have been some old disused practice revived under the pressure of national distress._

- _Encyclopædia Britannica_ (1911). Rumours that the first printing was halted, and the books pulped, are entirely false; likewise, there was no scandal which was hushed up by the family of the editor-in-chief.

~'/|\'~

The Herald surfaced.

This was not a simple process. For, you see, the assumption had been made that the creature would be perhaps the size of an Evangelion, as per all the previous examples of such entities. Even the longest, Yam, had been only roughly an order of magnitude longer than the Evangelions.

Shinji felt a sudden pulse, one of sheer, unadulterated **terror**, as the crystalline fracture of an AT-Field emerged from over the horizon to the south. For a sudden timeless moment, he froze, as his brain refused to process the scale of the object. It tore through a mountain as it rose and rose and rose, its unnatural, impossible luminescence shining brightly through the clouds of ash and rock from the volcanoes that its passage had induced, magma spewing out around, like a veil of mist. A plume of dust that swirled and embraced it, climbed past the entity high into the stratosphere, lightning and thunder boomed as static charges gathered in the environment, the blast of debris rushing over the surface of the earth, roiling and boiling and tumbling.

As for the beast itself; how to describe it? It was not altogether akin to the bloated ray-like things which dwell at the bottoms of the deepest abysses of the tumescent oceans, consuming the constant shower of carcasses which rain down upon the depths, where no light is ever seen. Nor was is purely arachnid, many eyes staring forth beyond a hardened carapace covered in hair-like protrusions. It was not the long-dead carcass of a whale, rotting around bleached bones, nor the slime-coated bulk of a gastropod mollusc, shell stripped from it by evolutionary processes, nor was it a thing with the smooth, precise curves which normally came only from design and manufacture, from technological origin. It was none of these things, for it took elements from all, and combined them into an abominable form which became, in the eye of the viewer the original; something which ray and spider and scorpion and rotting whale and slug and even manufactured good all partook of, but did not encompass, it.

And its dimensions were best measured in kilometres. The precise size could not be judged, for the lack of objects to scale it to, combined with the way that it seemed to shift and pulsate as it moved, sometimes close and large, sometimes far away and absolutely massive, meant that no clear reference could be obtained.

With one colossal mass; not quite a tentacle, not quite a wing, not quite a protruding bone, it reached out, the air screaming as air molecules were torn half by the infinitesimal edge of the AT-Field that embraced the appendage. Such finesse was not needed, though, as the shear momentum behind the suddenly-flat plane of ruptured space-time crushed a Swarm Ship like a cardboard box, the D-Engines rupturing before being subsumed by the forced nature of the jagged and decidedly not flat Minskowski space-time that the Guard of Yog-Sothoth bore with it. The impact, brief though it was, gave a slight scale of the beast.

Shinji realised he was screaming only when his lungs emptied of LCL. He took a gulp, and continued, frozen to the spot.

Misato stared up at the autocensored image on the display, multiple angles from E-9s scattered all around the island, mouth open. With a sudden, violent swirl of motion, she turned, and, eyes filled with unconstrained rage, grabbed Agent Tome by the throat, lifting the albino off the floor, as he choked and struggled.

"How the fuck were we supposed to capture that, you bastard!" she screamed at him in Japanese, spittle spraying over his face.

"It... wasn't meant... be that," he managed in the same language, around the hand clamped around his throat. "Also... no Migou."

With the violence born of lack of restraint, she threw him to the ground, turning her back even before he had finished tumbling, panting heavily. The man just lay on the floor, clutching at his throat and gasping.

"Right!" the Major yelled. "Someone get CATO Command and tell those Admirals and Field Marshalls I want the Herald nuked until it's deader than... a very dead thing! And if the Migou are going to a-matter _my_ pilots, _they've_ got no damn reason to protest about this. And since I've seen Herald survive atomics before, they'd better use the big stuff." She paused, coughing, and sucking in much needed air. "Listen to me, you three," she said to the Evangelion pilots, a little bit of the rage leaving her voice. "You _must_ run away. Listen to me. _You must run away_. Let the Migou get killed like this. We'll come up with a new plan when we can see what it can do," she added, her voice unsteady as doubt infiltrated it. "Asuka and Shinji, meet up with Rei at the location we're transmitting. You two are closer to it; get away."

"But what will that do?" protested Asuka, hyperventilating lungfuls of LCL. "What can we do..."

"Do... not be worried," stated Rei, her voice somewhat shaky.

That seemed to drag Shinji back. "You... it'll turn out all right?" he asked, desperately. "Are you... have you... are you sure?"

"You misunderstand. Worry is not useful." She coughed twice, a spluttering of LCL. "We... we should perform our orders to the best of our capabilities, without letting others..."

"_Schnauze! Halt die Schnauze!_" roared Asuka over the communications, before switching back to English. "Just shut up! Not helping!"

"Both of you, do as I say and just run!" ordered the Major, her voice shaking with somewhat omnidirectional anger. "Don't bicker; get away from it! Get back to the resupply point"

The twin figures of the Test Model and the Mass Production model turned, and fled from the monstrosity which had torn its way from the flesh of the Earth, as, behind them, the radiance of the AT-Field and the burning glow of the magma that spewed from the open wound fought for dominance.

~'/|\'~

The column of Faithful survivors made their way through the tunnels beneath the city (although now, perhaps, the term "ruins" was more accurate) of _Dagon'uvtu Oraribyrapr_, a snaking column largely composed of children in heavy coats, their filtration masks covering their features. Less than one in seven of the individuals in the line were in the armour that they had taken from the military supplies; proper modern gear, not the Cold War II era equipment of the militia. That had been handed down, to the elder children, who now displayed a disparate mismatch of whatever gear could be spared; helmets and webbing over the civilian warm clothing and filtration masks. The very earth was shaking frequently now, even after the terrible set of earthquakes had seemingly stopped. The dust on the floors danced continuously, the air filled with a haze which was disturbingly similar to NEG emfog. The squalling of small children could be heard from all around.

One of these older children, sent back as a runner to the middle of the line, arrived, panting beneath his mask.

"_Veer'thyne'yrnq-re_," he managed, pronouncing it correctly, "up ahead... the tunnel's collapsed. It's just rocks and stuff."

Khonatqa muttered curses to herself in Ry'lehan, then glanced to the shorter figures of her half-sisters beside her. Well, from the way that the elder one, a handgun on a sling around her neck that had originally been designed for carbines, was covering up the younger one's ears, _she_ at the very least already knew what they meant.

"We're going to have to go up, use one of the hidden access tunnels to get out," she said. "Look at the walls," she pointed at a cluster of Ry'lehan hieroglyphics, "you can read that we're below..." she squinted, "... Cra-gr'k Industrial. It'll just be a short bit across the surface, and we can get back down. Spread the message that everyone has to be sure that all their gear is sealed, that their weapons are ready, and that the small children are under control."

The runner nodded, and left. The noise level in the tunnels rose, as everyone checked their gear, or looked at the suits of the little ones, checking that the LEDs were still blue-green. If they went red, that meant that there was a breach. They were those colours, because that way it ensured that both human and Deep One alike could read them; yellow would have been unseen to Deep Ones, just as infra-red would have been to humans.

"Yhu, I want you to cover your ears," Ghuhulia said to her little sister, once she had done her own and checked Yhughui'ne's. "I just want to talk to the _Veer'thyne'yrnq-re_, and I don't want you to get scared. 'kay? I'm not going to leave you."

The five-year old nodded, the mask that covered her entire head under the hood sliding around, slightly too large, then she clamped overly large gloves over where her ears would be.

Khonatqa stared down at the CW2 gas-mask staring up at her, and momentarily suppressed a shiver.

"A lot of people are going to die doing this, aren't they?" the little girl said softly, muffled even further by the mask."

"Maybe," Khonatqa admitted. "But only if we stumble into the blasphemers."

"Mummy's already dead, isn't she." The words were not a question. "_Gulifr'kre_ too, though he's not really that important, as he's not my real daddy."

A blast shook the ceiling, the lights flickering.

Khonatqa nodded. Almost certainly; it was a mild shame. Raguelle hadn't been that bad a worker, though a little lazy. "And, no, he wasn't important."

"I dr-dr-dreamed it, and I tried to explain it to her, and she didn't l-listen and I didn't tell h-her it properly because... because I was scared that she'd get worried," the eight-year old let out in a burble. "She just th-th-thought I was talking about the fact that she wa-wasn't one of the Blooded and was going to die like that rather than like this. B-bu-but we're go-going to die. We're all going to d-die."

The lights flickered again, the whispering buzzing noise of the panels audible as they flicked on and off repeatedly.

The older woman took in a breath, air rushing over her gills as well as into her lungs, and let it out. "Dreams are just dreams, most of the time. Only the most favoured among the Blooded and Chosen can ever become a _sh'gher fr're_ and receive visions of the future from _Cthulhu'ybeq_ or ]_Dagon'ybeq_. You're just feeling guilty because..."

Another runner appeared. "_Veer'thyne'yrnq-re_," this one, this time a teenage girl, too young for her first pregnancy, said, "we've got the hatch open. We can start getting people up the ladder, the other _Veer'thyne_ looked up, and it seemed to be safe."

"W-what are you going to do about the _sha'tbvq-nyvra_," said Ghuhalia, keeping her face turned away her little sister, who still obediently had her gloves clamped over the side of her filtration hood, stopping the little girl from seeing her tear-filled eyes.

"Get ready to move out, then," ordered Khonatqa. She paused, as the words of her half-sister filtered through her ears. "Wait, what?"

"They're already h-here..." whispered Ghuhalia. "And there's... s-s-some w-w-worse th-things out there. I've seen them in m-m-my dreams." She turned up, and locked wet eyes with the half-sister who she had not know about before today. "F-f-fire sweeping over the earth. And s-s-so many bodies."

~'/|\'~

"You are instructed to obtain a strategic missile launch. It will always be possible to blame it on the Dagonites later. It has been deemed better for you to beg forgiveness over the corpse of a Herald than ask permission."

"We're going to have to go through GATCN. The President is there."

There was a pause.

"The President is aware of what is happening, and retains active control?"

"They had to bring her in, after the first Dagonite nuclear weapons. It's not as if you can keep that kind of thing secret."

"That's a problem." There was an intake of breath. "If there had not been contact, it would have been possible that a minister or command Triumvirate could have authorised it, in such an emergency. That would have been a trivial exercise"

"Yes."

The drumming of fingers.

"Permission for a LANCE deployment will be refused."

"Almost certainly."

"That is an issue. Although other paths to obtain such a thing exist, it is not desirable that those methods be revealed yet."

A shrug.

"We can still ask."

"It is not that. It is merely that... well, she has the potential to be inconvenient. And if there is one thing that this situation does not need, it is... inconvenience."

~'/|\'~

The soul-blasted remains of the _Weny Komdy_ had been joined by another Loyalist, the look of profound horror on his face locked in by impossibly rapid rigour mortis.

"New target assigned," stated Kantya-14. "Temporary Loyalist command centre located by other Eidelon Combat Units."

"They are laying SCU cables for high emfog comms," continued Kantya-15, in an identical monotone, without a break. "Any high value targets are to prepared for extraction, and the communications systems eliminated."

"Objectives update understood," answered Foxtrot-813, ensconced within the stolen Loyalist power armour. "Data squirt received. Route determined." He paused. "Estimated threat levels noted," he stated. "This unit will take vanguard position."

"Agreed, Foxtrot-813," said Kantya-12. "Note the presence of Loyalist Elites."

"Presence was noted. Ready to move on command."

The four Replica Elites, their changing colour of their armour blending into the surroundings, and the stolen power armour left through the breached door to the rest of the Dagonite tunnel network through which they had arrived. There were occasional wet noises, as the Oyanari stood on the corpses, torn apart by hypervelocity railgun slugs, energy weapons, or occasionally just riddled with bullets, that they had created in their arrival.

Somewhere in the ruins of a factory, a almost unnoticeable floor tile cracked, the dust covering it puffing into the air. A second blow served to clear the opening, before the power armour emerged from the hole, like a rather technophilic and militant Venus from the depths of the ocean. Only with more climbing and dust, and less sea-foam and naked babies with wings.

With a tinkling, the lock fell out of the ruined hatch.

Looking around, it could be seen that the battle had raged through here already. The roof was entirely missing, its remnants obscuring the scorched and melted remains of murals painted on the floor. The production line was a charred mess of metal and plastics, fused solid where the plastic had not burned. At one end of the room, superior senses of the Replicas could discern discarded shell casings of AW1-era automatic weapons, and a few of the pre-booster stages of anti-tank missiles; a few of their users scattered around in the area, unmoving. High above, the booms of supersonic air units spoke of their presence in the fire-lit smoke and clouds, as Migou [combat-form/networks], now deprived of their capital-grade support, still pushed back the New Earth Government Navy aircraft.

The two footprints dug deep into the floor, the right size for a forty-metre tall arcanocyberxenobiological war machine, drawing a line between two gaps in the walls, and the fact that one entire half of the building, and everything visible through the hole, was nothing more than flat slagged glass, was also a bit of a clue.

"Clear," reported 813, as he swiftly moved into cover, lowering the profile of the armour next to what looked like the remains of an arm. "No hostiles visible. There's widespread devastation from unknown high energy discharge... plasma, probably. It appears too widespread for a charge beam, and the distribution is wrong for a laser."

In pairs, the Elite followed him, dispersing behind the remnants of the infrastructure, their armour fading to a dusty splotchy grey, overlain with amorphous shapes which merely broke their image up further. All five of the Eidelon Units threw repeated glances at the slagged mess, and the footprints. The glass, digging down into the hellish landscape, was still radiating heat. It was fortunate that the tunnels they had used had not passed under that mess; they would have been fused solid.

"Potential threat or hazard to the mission?" asked Kantya-15 over the network, the Replicas in close enough proximity to punch through the emfog. "Negative. Projected probability is that damage was inflicted by prototype Evangelion Titan-class capital unit."

"Affirmed," added Kantya-14. "Projection matches personal estimates."

"Dissenting opinion," retorted, insofar as such a term can be applied to a monotone, Kantya-12. "It was the Mass Production model, not the Prototype."

"I did not say that it was the Prototype," said Kantya-15. "I did not specify which unit it was. I agree with your projection on the Unit ID, however."

"Yes, you did," responded Kantya-12.

"No, I did not. I stated that the Evangelion Units are prototypes."

The earth shook, as the clouds above lit up briefly in a white light, only to die off again.

"The Mass Production Model is not. Hence the name. Technically, neither is the Test Model. The majority are not prototypes."

"But they are still prototypes, compared to the Engel units, which have been implemented in much greater numbers and use the same fundamental technology as the base."

"Both of you, shut up," stated Kantya-13, in a way which would have been described as flat, had the Replica possessed a more expanded emotional repertoire. "Your behaviour is inefficient, abnormal, and not necessary for the mission. Desist."

"I await further instructions," said Foxtrot-813, who had been listening to the conversation with hints of confusion. This kind of internal debate was unusual among the normal Eidelon Combat Units. The fact that he had not been able to contact Command since the initial blast just made things more problematic; it meant that he was unable to receive or request the necessary support that the tightly organised powered armour units normally received. It was probably a consequence of the additional independence that a commando unit would require, although they seemed to have no problem receiving messages. "What formation should we use to advance?"

"Satru-4," stated Kantya-15, as the six-eyed helmet poked above the entrance. "Ghost..." the Replica Elite stiffened and fell silent. "It comes."

"It wakes," agreed Kantya-13. "It can be felt."

"Emergency protocol override, orders changed," chorused all four Elites, in unison. "Regrouping at Point Alpha-Zulu-02. Preparing for evac. Switching to pseudo-independent mode."

"Understood," replied Foxtrot-813. "Eidelon Combat Unit ready to follow orders. New destination set."

And the sky to the south lit up.

~'/|\'~

As one, the Migou fleet disengaged from the New Earth Government forces, discharging all their decoys and emptying their reservoirs of emfog as they did it. The vast clouds of micro-and-nanoparticles that bloomed around them hung like liquid in the air, more akin to a veil than to a cloud. The vortices and flows of the movement of the atmosphere, thrown and tossed by the passage of the vast ships and their lesser craft, and by the thermals from the war below, were made visible for all to see. It would not aid them against this foe, and they could but hope that the uplifted apes of Species ᵺᶙӎӎшѧ would have the self-preservation to permit them to engage the _real_ foe without distraction or sapping vital troops. Even the [Terrestrial Planet Combat] [Deployment Craft] in the process of landing troops began to shift in form, closing the spread-out ribcage on the underside of the massive ships which shielded their forces as they deployed

The Adjunct of Deployed Strategic Reserves was already concerned. They had taken excessive casualties even before they had landed, and there were certainly {HAZARDS} active on the island. Certainly {HAZARDS}; potentially {THREATS}, albeit lesser ones than the the {SLEEPER IN FIRE}. Some reports were even coming in that they seemed to be equipped as scaled up versions of the converted {LESSER SERVITORS} that Species ᵺᶙӎӎшѧ was known to use.

If that were true, the Adjunct of Deployed Strategic Reserves would be putting a motion for planetary sterilisation, and damn the consequences. The proliferation of {THREATS} was far beyond anything that could be permitted, even if it would wake other such foes. Attempting to harness the engine of their own destruction...only Species ᵺᶙӎӎшѧ could be so foolish.

Well, Species ᵺᶙӎӎшѧ and the Tsab.. And Species ǻǳǣǖȝ, though reports coming in from the far end of the spiral arm indicated that they were on the verge of being wiped out, contained after their contamination by a mere {HAZARD} resident on one of the planets in their system had enabled them to break a too-weak Exclusion Volume. And the... well, there were far too many suicidal young species that would bring entire star clusters down with them, if the Migou had not been there to ensure that the local area of space was one compatible with their own continued existence.

The Adjunct of Deployed Strategic Reserves dismissed these thoughts with a slight buzz of the wings of the primary [body-form/individual] ensconced within the bridge of the [Terrestrial Planet Combat] [Local Supremacy Craft], deep within its hull, and turned its collected attention to the [body-form/individual] integrated with the ships systems.

The reports were indeed dire, when the upcoming threat of the {SLEEPER IN FIRE} was taken into account. The casualties in such a hot-drop, against local capital-grade defences, were always going to be horrific, as the reduced detection signature necessary for any modern military unit to survive on the battlefield was completely incompatible with atmospheric re-entry at this kind of velocity. Especially when the [New Earth Government] appeared, from their best estimates, to have suspected that they were coming, and emplaced a specialist anti-capital charge beam at the centre of the island, which remained operational, despite their best efforts. Yes, they could certainly eliminate all the remaining [New Earth Government] and [Esoteric Order of Dagon] forces on the island; but that was not why they were there. They were there to contain the {THREAT} which had just surfaced, and the Adjunct of Deployed Strategic Reserves was certain that they would take horrendous casualties

Adjunct of Deployed Strategic Reserves: Of the initial [(one-36)] [Terrestrial Planet Combat] [Local Supremacy Craft] (non-standard);

[(five)] have been [destroyed/eliminated] by unidentified (presumed [NEG]) relativistic particle beam fire from an unidentified capital grade unit.

[(two)] have been [destroyed/eliminated] by known [NEG] local fleet actions.

[(one)] has been [destroyed/eliminated] by unknown causes.

[(one)] has been [destroyed/eliminated] by the actions of the {SLEEPER IN FIRE}.

[(seven)] have been [damaged/rendered] such that they are incapable of full [action/deed] for this operation by unidentified (presumed [NEG]) relativistic particle beam fire from an unidentified capital grade unit, although will be able to [conduct/perform] support duties.

[(five)] have been [damaged/rendered] such that they are incapable of full [action/deed] for this operation by known [NEG] local fleet actions, although will be able to [conduct/perform] support duties.

[(six)] have suffered [minor/limited] damage, and are capable of fulfilling the mission objectives.

[(nine)] remain intact and fully combat-ready.

Adjunct of Deployed Strategic Reserves: Of the initial [(one-36) and (nine)] [Terrestrial Planet Combat] [Deployment Craft] (non-standard);

[(six)] have been [destroyed/eliminated] by unidentified (presumed [NEG]) relativistic particle beam fire from an unidentified capital grade unit.

[(six)] have been [destroyed/eliminated] by known [NEG] local fleet actions.

[(one)] has been [destroyed/eliminated] by unknown causes while [landed/unloading].

[(two)] have landed, and suffered such [damage/injury] that they are incapable of sustained flight until [repairs/replacements] are made, but have or are deploying troops in full.

[(eight)] have been [damaged/rendered] such that they are incapable of full [action/deed] for this operation by unidentified (presumed [NEG]) relativistic particle beam fire from an unidentified capital grade unit, although will be able to [conduct/perform] support duties.

[(seven)] have been [damaged/rendered] such that they are incapable of full [action/deed] for this operation by known [NEG] local fleet actions, although will be able to [conduct/perform] support duties.

[(eleven)] have suffered [minor/limited] damage, and are capable of fulfilling the mission objectives.

[(four)] remain intact and fully combat-ready.

Adjunct of Deployed Strategic Reserves: Of the initial [(two)] [General Out-System] [Local Supremacy Craft];

[(two)] remain intact and fully combat-ready.

The Adjunct of Deployed Strategic Reserves made a buzz of irritation, at the reminder of how they had suffered in the approach. That relativistic particle beam fire had broken up their line of approach, directed at the ones that had been ordered to land close to the target zones, even before they had broken from the main formation. Even before they should have known such a thing. It was... concerning. It was known that Species ᵺᶙӎӎшѧ possessed the ability to manifest precognitive powers; of course they would. But they were normally rare in such a species at this level of development and sapience, and there had been a non-negligible rise, over the previous [(two-36th)] of a Yuggothian cycle. It was not the rise that was the alarming thing; such species often did unstable things akin to this, as they experimented with themselves and with the arcane. Indeed, Species ᵺᶙӎшѧ was somewhat unusually reluctant to engage in [body-form/self] modifications; most dangerous young species normally radically altered themselves, especially if they were {TAINTED} or {CONTAMINATED}. No, it was the ratio of certain extranormal abilities which had left the wise among the sorcerer-scientists, like the Handler of Xenobiological Organisms (who spoke on this manner across the networks on every opportunity, incessantly and at great length) disturbed.

The increasing use of such phenomena on the battlefield was merely another manifestation of the malaise that afflicted this planet. The Adjunct of Deployed Strategic Reserves would be glad when Three was properly Contained, and they could move away from this place, back to the outer system and the Oort Cloud, rather than be forced to spend time in a dense atmospheric, high gravity environment like this. It expressed a great dislike of such places; even Three-Orbital-First and Four were unpleasant in a combat body-form, as opposed to an acceleration body-form of the type used for long-distance travel or a micro-gravity body-form like those used all throughout the Oort Cloud.

The [body-form/individual] buzzed its wings, settling its mind. It was getting distracted, its mind already repelled by the thought of the {THREAT} and the fact that it, most likely, faced [self-form/death] against such a thing as this. It did not matter. It was quite willing to face cessation if it could have the consolation that it had fulfilled its role and sent the {SLEEPER IN FIRE} back to the [dreaming/death] from where it had came.

It felt a twinge in the [body-form/individual] that was plugged directly into the communications network, aiding the synchronisation of the fleet, that indicated an external contact authorised by the [Void Forces]. It acknowledged the message, from one of the two [General Out-System] [Local Supremacy Craft] that still hung, fusion drives burning, high above this planet, barely in the atmosphere.

Commodore of Orbital Supremacy: This [combat-form/individual] wishes to pass [information/warning] to the Deployed Strategic Reserves.

Adjunct D. S. R: This [body-form/individual] acknowledges the [request/message], and [authorises/grants] the Commodore of Orbital Supremacy access to communications.

Commodore O. S.: This [combat-form/individual] thanks the Adjunct of Deployed Strategic Reserves.

The Commodore of Orbital Supremacy, its body (like that of its crew) so rebuilt for the high accelerations that a warship must handle, that they were incompatible of forming a [self-form/network] network with the most common phenotype among the local Migou, vibrated. Eyes, which to Species ᵺᶙӎшѧ would have been glowing an odd reddish-green, but to the Migou had a very strong ultraviolet component, stared forth from the outside of the armoured shell in which its nervous system, held in place, existed. It didn't really matter. It wasn't really attached to this shell except in a metaphysical sense; it was a distributed intellect in the warship, able to survive accelerations that would have left its base form a thinly smeared mess against the wall, let alone what Species ᵺᶙӎшѧ or the loyal examples of Species ᵺᶙӎшѧ-[α] could have tolerated. Its senses were the ship's senses. Its body was the ship's body.

And so it opened a channel to the rest of the fleet with nothing more than a thought, because the ship's communications organs were its communications organs

Commodore O. S.: This [combat-form/individual] wishes to inform the [surviving/remaining] [self-form/individuals] of the Deployed Strategic Reserves that [containment/sterilisation] of the {THREAT} of the {SLEEPER IN FIRE} is about to [commence/begin]. All [self-form/individuals] should have at least one [body-form/individual] outside the projected blast radius. [Sterilisation/containment] begins in [(three-36) and (twelve)] lesser time units.

And with that said, it cut the link. Oh, the Deployed Strategic Reserves had been inept in a way that had imperilled that all! The Commodore of Orbital Supremacy was terrified by what it was going to do, for it bore the risk of waking more of the {THREATS}. But if it need be done, it was best that it be done quickly, for who knew what the {SLEEPER IN FIRE} would do with wakefulness?

~'/|\'~

There was a crunch, loud in the deathly silence which had just fallen, as the President slammed the PCPU she had just been handed down against the table. A tiny amount of fluid oozed out from the broken device, the synthetic odour immediately bonded to by the nanoscrubbers that filled the air.

"Would anyone _care_ to tell me what the hell is going on in Iceland!" she yelled at the ceiling.

"Certainly, Madam President," began one of the Field Marshalls, an haggard woman with a full head of snow-white hair said. The youthful brightness of her eyes all but stated that they were not her first pair, but were instead a vat-grown replacement. "If you will but..."

"Please, don't patronise me, Fazil," snapped President Nyanda. "I was informed of the very existence of this massive military deployment all of... oh," she said, putting a finger to her mouth to match her expression of mock puzzlement, "_yesterday_, and then only because you lot couldn't keep the fact that the fish-fucke... men had used _nuclear weapons_ from the Cabinet. Now the damn _Migou_ have dropped from orbit pulling accelerations which, if I recall my school days," she said, exaggerating her youth compared to the average age of the room, "should be leaving them as _red __jam_..."

"Ma'am, Migou ichor isn't actually red..."

"...shut up. Where was I? Oh yes. The Migou have dropped from orbit with the largest single deployment ever in a way that intelligence reports _assure_ me means they must be desperate. They are making use of _antimatter_ weapons in a _tactical_ capacity. They have bought _two_ of their six warships into the _atmosphere_. I'm surprised they haven't just crashing the damn _Hive Ship_ into Iceland the way they're acting." She pointed down at the wrecked PCPU on the table, panting in a rather deliberate way. "And _now_ you tell me that a massive ship-sized ENE with some kind of sorcerous shield has appeared, and you want to deploy the _strategic nuclear arsenal_!" The last words were almost shrieked.

The government officials and military leaders around the table glanced at each other. They were actually physically here; there was no way that the bandwidth for AR-projecting would be allowed in and out of this bunker, which had (unbeknownst to almost everyone around the table) defences both mundane and sorcerous which were _almost_ as good as those in a Vault. It was an understandable reaction from the President, although a little heavy in sarcasm. It was, unfortunately, at the moment rather unhelpful, when launch authority was needed

"Yes, Madam President," said the Minster of War, Genevieve Aristide, finally. "I am requesting permission for the strategic arsenal to be deployed on behalf of the CATO ground forces, against the ENE. We do not intend to target the Migou, and they seem as keen to kill it as we are, so they should not retaliate... at least according to the xenopsych experts. And, actually, we don't want to just use the fusion weapons. If you hadn't... if you check further down on the list," she said, trying to ignore the damage to the PCPU, given the way that the President's hand was twitching, "the Mixcoatl warheads were to be the 'decoy'." She paused, trying not to push Helen Nyanda too far, before she said the next thing.

Unfortunately, the President glared at her, as if she were reading her mind. For a pretty face, who, it was widely agreed, had got the position after only after her predecessor had been embroiled in a nasty funding scandal, and the assassination of her husband (whose first name she now used as a surname) earned her sympathy, she was too sharp by far. "You want to use one of the LANCE systems?" she snapped, still panting. "Are you insane?"

"No." Geniveve Aristide paused, tucking an errant hair back behind her ear. "By our estimates, we need to use something of that potential yield to be sure that we take down something like..."

"The LANCEs are vital for GODSPEAR," interrupted the dark-skinned woman. "And I don't want to waste the best shot we have at killing that Hive Ship, once and for all, by letting the Migou find out about GODSPEAR because you, Genevieve, authorised a secret military operation without any reference to the Cabinet or me! Damn it, you're near the line! You may even be on the far side of it!"

The rest of the room stared at the two woman; the President and the Minister of War (one enraged, the other keeping her expression mask-like) locked together. There was a cough from the end of the table. A male Nazzadi, a single, asymmetric curving tattoo on his left cheek a contrast to the hints of white starting to creep into his hair, just at the roots, glanced over at the President.

"Madam President," he said, not a trace of a Nazzadi accent in his flawless Reformed accent, "I have just received information which I believe that you would wish to hear, before you make your decision."

The President blinked first, and sat down. "Certainly, Representative," she said, unconsciously smoothing out her jacket, and favouring him with a faint, albeit slightly fixed, smile.

The Representative from the Ashcroft Foundation for North America (and, technically speaking, the first among equals of the continental Representatives, as the individual responsible for the capital of the New Earth Government) nodded. "I will be brief, as this is an emergency. I have just received information that the true aim of CATO was accomplished." He raised his hands at the uproar. "Please," he said, turning up the volume on his microphone to drown out the noise.

"Shut up, everyone" ordered the President, glaring at the Representative as she did so. The room fell silent; there was something disturbingly teacher-like about that tone. "What do you mean?"

"Yes. CATO was never about the reconquest of Iceland, not really. The GIA had received information that there was a high-value target, attempting some kind of summoning ritual, on the island. The rest of CATO was a distraction, to permit a team consisting of the Foundation's three capital-grade Evangelion Titan-class ACXB mecha to spearhead an assault, with the primary goal being the elimination of the target, and the prevention of the ritual. By precedent, they have had noted successes in such roles, including the destruction of the ENE which nearly breached the naval defences near Chicago-2 on the 13th last month."

"You failed then, Jara!" interrupted Field Marshal Fazil. "Look at the ENE here!"

The Nazzadi nodded. "Sadly, we were unable to get there before the target could complete the ritual. However, the primary target was successfully killed. Madam President, Dagon is dead."

"Dagon... you mean?" whispered the President.

"Yes," he nodded. "Dagon, as in, 'Esoteric Order of' was successfully eliminated."

A deathly hush fell over the room. Slowly, the cheers started, only to die out as they remembered the fact that there was a massive extra-normal entity rampaging through the area.

The Representative bowed. "That is all."

There was a pause.

"We estimate that only one LANCE would be required to take down the target," interjected a young-looking, bald male amlati in the uniform of a GIA analyst, trying to keep the original conversation running despite the interruption. "That would still leave us with ei..."

"No," said Helen Nyanda, flatly, clamping down on the bubbly glee that she could feel at the news. "I am not going to endanger GODSPEAR, when it could rid us of the Hive Ship, even with this good news. That is it. No discussion. I am prepared to unlock the strategic nuclear arsenal, but I _expressly_ refuse to unlock the orbital systems." She raised one hand, underskin command implants already shining through her skin. "Are you aware of how long it took us to get those things into orbit?" she asked rhetorically, as she immersed her hand in the blue-gloop of the suitcase-like device an aide had placed in front of her. "Limited Release; authorised by New Earth Government President Helen Nyanda. Unlock Strategic Arsenal, up to Tonatiuh-category weapons," she said calmly, ignoring the squirming feelings on top of, and underneath the skin, running all the way up her arm and throughout her body, as the systems they'd installed in her even before she had been inaugurated confirmed the lack of Blank-modifications or uncharacteristic mental influences. "Six hour Release."

There was a nod from the aide beside her.

The authorisation was valid.

~'/|\'~

Unit 01 and 02 raced, side-by-side, eating up the distance almost as quickly as they tore up the surfaces below them, as directly behind them the bulk of the Herald cast its unnatural radiance over the land, the intensity akin to that of a false moon.

"I must run away," muttered Shinji. "I must run away."

"I think it might be... it's following us," groaned Asuka, as she managed to squeeze a little more velocity out of the towering behemoth which now seemed very small. "This is just ridiculous! Run away faster! Although," she added, a faint smirk on her lips which was betrayed by the worry in her voice, "at least it's bright enough to know what the real threats are."

And, indeed, the bulk of Moloch, twisted appendages writhing and twisting so that they sometimes passed through each other in a way which was oddly repetitive despite its initially random appearance was coming closer. The burning suns of the Migou plasma cannons seemed to be doing nothing; the smears of ionised gas dispersing upon contact with the fractured light of the AT-Field.

"I'd prefer if it were more stupid in that case," retorted Shinji, matching pace with her, and overtaking again, as Unit 01 was no longer weighed down by the main weapon. "Mot took damage from less firepower than that. _And we don't have a spare arcology power grid!_"

"Less banter, more running," commanded Asuka. "Misato! Misato! Can you hear us? Shinji! How far away is it?"

There was no response from command; not even a crackle. What did occur was a series of blasts against the AT-Field, as tactical antimatter-warheads began to burst against the side and top of the monstrosity, the fireballs lopsided as the violated space-time refused the annihilation passage.

"Uh..." the boy paused, looking at the wall of the entry plug. "Um. It's... I don't know! It's jumping around! The system is all confused! Anywhere from 1600 metres to 120 km!"

"Brilliant," Asuka snarled. "Is it actually teleporting, or is it just screwing with your sensors?"

"How would I know?" he responded. "How could I tell the difference? It... it... argh!" he gasped, as Migou fightercraft opened up, the laser cannons cutting down with the snap of superheated air. The Evangelion stumbled, more from the shock than from any damage, before picking up the pace again. The laser defence grid lashed out, incepting the accompanying wave of missiles; it was fortunate that they seemed to be using all their larger munitions against the Herald.

"Ignore them, Shinji," said Asuka. "Just keep runni... _Scheiße!_" The laser pulse which had prompted the exclamation, the mid-ultraviolet electromagnetic radiation scoring down her left arm before she could manifest just enough of an AT _the tarmac had been cold under her feet, the shoes really not suitable for this. They had walked past row after row of abandoned car, almost all old petchems, and her mother had told her to be careful_ Field to get her out of the way. "Drone!"

The two Evangelions scattered. "Yeah! I _know_!" said Shinji, as he threw himself back, right arm of the Evangelion clutched over the damage from that charge beam, head angled as so to maximise what the one functional eye of the Evangelion could see. "Kill it!"

"It's out of range!" snapped Asuka. "Just distract it!"

"Distract it!" he retorted, the head-mounted lasers now back under manual control, but not even scratching the surface of the capital ship. "How am I meant to do that?"

"Keep firing uselessly at it," she shouted back, breaking into a sprint that quickly turned into a dive to the side, when the laser cut a path back towards her. "Do it more!"

"They're not idiots," he yelled, as warning signals bloomed across the projection, tracking the hostile projectiles as best they could, "... and missiles! The ships just launched a swarm! They can see that you have the big gun!"

"Damn it! Where _is_ Rei?" snapped the girl. "Just run. We can see if we can get it in denser terrain."

"Denser terrain? Denser terrain? We're in forty-metre giant robots! About the only dense terrain we can get is a high-rise city..."

"You know what I meant!"

"... and even then, the stuff that can hurt us just shoots straight through buildings and an entire Swarm Ship to get you!" The boy took a deep breath. "It ripped through like it was tissue paper," he added in a softer voice, unconsciously raising a hand from his controls to rest it over his chest. Yes, the vat-cultured flash had repaired the damage that the sympathetic feedback from the hole that Mot had torn in his... in the Evangelion's body (he had merely suffered burns). But that didn't mean that it hadn't hurt, or that he couldn't remember that horrifying spike of agony that had coruscated through his mind in the tiny fraction of a second (according to Dr Akagi) that it had taken the neurons in his brain to fire and the corresponding breakdown in synchronisation to minimise the damage.

Actually, now that he though about it... that was really odd. How could he have felt it, if there hadn't been time for his brain to react? He could ask Ritsuko for more details, but, Shinji was fairly sure, even if he didn't merely get exposed to either brusque preoccupation or somewhat patronising condescension, any explanation that he did get would firstly not make much sense unless you had some kind of high level degree in arcane sciences (probably multiple ones), and secondly overuse the prefixes 'arcano-' and 'anima-'. And probably various terms in German, too. Why was it that no-one had the decency to overthrow the supremacy of the Germanic languages in the field of obfuscatory scientific jargon, anyway? He was sure that he'd do a lot better at understanding them if they used Japanese, like he was sure, deep down, that they were meant to.

Of course, there were probably times to discuss the nature of languages, and how they evolved, shifted, and, as both a carrier of memes and a memeplex in their own right, vied for supremacy. When crouched down in as low a profile as possible, in a fissure opened by the surfacing of some ancient alien _thing_, to avoid a spaceship crewed by a different kind of alien shooting you with a giant laser was not one of those times, and served only to distract one from more important tasks.

Sometimes Shinji hated his own mind. And it returned the favour, and suggested a few new ways that he could die in the next few minutes. With pictures.

~'/|\'~

"Can you get through to them!" asked Misato, her knuckles white as she grasped the railing in front of her. On the map of Iceland, the entire area around the Herald was shockingly low resolution, the entire area surrounded in a bright-red dome cascading warnings and odd image corruptions, though the fires and the clouds, meshing and shredding each other with each new blastwave, could be picked out. The marker for Unit 00 was the only one visible; the other two Evangelions were somewhere in that hell.

Lieutenant Aoba, looking decidedly queasy, shook his head. "No," he called back. "We're not even getting sigcors." He paused. "It could mean that either their comms are down, that they're not even getting them, or..."

"... or 01 and 02 have been destroyed," said Captain Martello, flatly. "Each of those shots from the warships are in the seventy to eighty megaton range, and there's no way that the Eva could take being at ground zero of that. If they were too close to them..."

The **[VOICE ONLY]** connection back to London-2 symbol turned green on the mainscreen. "That's not true," interjected Ritsuko, the multi-second latency slowing down any attempts to communicate. "An AT-Field could theoretically withstand it... no, let's rephrase it. An Eva's AT-Field could _theoretically_ withstand it, given a high enough synch-ratio and... well, luck. We can actually _see_ that a Herald's one can," she added morosely. "Our own strategic weapons aren't going to do a thing, if the Migou can't kill it." There was a pause. "Unit 00 is far too damaged to be able to face that thing," she said, slowly. "You have to pull it out, Misato; we can't lose all three Evas."

"Ritsuko, have you got a look at the interface yet?" the Major asked, coldly. "It's not going to matter if someone doesn't kill it. Even if the Herald doesn't kill us all, look what the Migou are doing. They're chucking megatonnes around like water, and _they've never done that before_. They want Moloch **dead** " She smiled grimly. "They may be a bunch of alien bug bastards, but they have a certain sense of style, I can grant them that. It's what I'd do if I had orbital weapons."

"Yes, yes you would," remarked Ritsuko, a dry note in her voice. "I think it's for the best that you weren't serving in CW2. But that's why Unit 00, in the state that it's in, shouldn't move in. After all, if it's destroyed, and the Migou kill the Herald, we'll have no defences against any later ones."

The static portrait of Rei joined Ritsuko's on the screen, the profile of Unit 00 beside her picture covered in red warning lights. "I remain functional," the girl said, her voice weak. There were several deep breaths of LCL, an odd gurgling noise that echoed oddly around the control room. "I... will fulfil my assigned role. I... will... fulfil my purpose. I... I... I am I."

"Unit 00 is moving towards the interface boundary," reported one of the forwards technicians. "Major... she's... it's barely holding together. We've got complete ablative epidermis failure, multiple hardplate ruptures which have breached the organism itself..."

"I can see that," the black-haired woman replied, jaw locked. "But... Ritsuko, have you seen that interface around the area? Look at it. It's like POLLEN. It's forming a ASZ."

There was the pause, as words made their way to L2 and back again.

"I know!" Ritsuko almost shrieked. "But you know what, Misato? We can't do anything about it! The Evas can't operate in that kind of environment; not with the Migou doing that! Pull back Rei, and we can get a salvage team to stop the Eva falling apart or dying under her, while the Migou try to kill the... _it_! But now, right now? We can't do anything about a ASZ, or the Herald, or the Migou. About all we can do is stomp on the fucking fishmen in their stupid CW2 gear! You understand? They're too _damaged!_"

The Major paused, tendons straining on the back of her hands and in her neck. "You! Tome!" she commanded. "Do you have anything at all on Moloch? Any secret weaknesses you OSS bastards have forgotten to mention, or any hidden superweapons?"

The albino glared back, from the seat which he was slumped into, PCPU open on his lap. "No!" he snapped back, in a hoarse voice, hand still clutched protectively over the finger-print bruises on his throat. "It... Moloch wasn't meant to be like this. There was one thing we could have used, but it need the _Solomon Throne_ intact. And the known details, on the... on the Herald; we woke it up too fast, as you ordered, rather than in a controlled fashion as we had planned. It was _meant_ to be smaller than an Eva, and barely aware!"

The woman sighed. "Oh." She made a disgusted noise in the back of her throat. "Rei, you are to hold where you are, and wait for us to pull up some repair craft. You can't help the other two now, and we can't risk losing you too."

There was no response from Unit 00.

"Pilot Ayanami!" ordered the Major. "Respond! Acknowledge the orders!"

"I... I have other instructions which overwrite those... those orders," Rei responded, eventually. "I h-have been instructed by Representative Ikari to ensure..." she gasped in pain, "....that the integrity of Unit 01 is maintained. It is _*crssssshhh*_" Unit 00's location marker entered the flagged area on the map, and vanished, just as the communications ceased.

"Shut it down! Stop her going any further!"

"Won't work, Major," said Makota, shaking his head. "The Evangelion's in autistic mode, even if we could contact it. It's specifically set up to prevent Migou-induced forced shutdown."

Misato's grasp on the railing went slack, and her shoulders slumped. She could feel the pain coursing through her palms, banded bruises from where she had been squeezing too hard, but it was nothing compared to the mental anguish.

_No. No. No. It's all going wrong. All three of the Evas are in one of _those _places. We can't contact them. We don't even know if Shinji and Asuka are still alive. It's happening again; I'm going to lose them too. And it's my fault again. I can't take this again. Not after China, and NKL, and before. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry._

~'/|\'~

The other two Evangelions spun to hear the roaring, tearing noise that the cockpit systems rendered the charge-beam shot as. It reached out, green aftertrail tracing out a path to Moloch.

Unit 00... was not in a good state. That much was certain. And considering the level of damage that it had sustained before it had been left on its own, surrounded by hostile forces that were specifically targeting it, while low on coolant for its primary weapon, that was saying something. It was barely recognisable as an Evangelion. The first layer of hardplates were, in the patches where they had not already been punched through, slagged and melted, direct hits from the ventral plasma weapons slagging even the heat resistant ceramics. The second layer and the third were in similar states; in some points, the naked flesh and machinery of the Evangelion was exposed. The head had almost been clean torn off; it lolled to the side, a charge beam shot having glanced the side. A gaping wound in the abdomen of the Unit looked like it had been dangerously close to the entry plug, clean into the sternum. The right arm looked like it was being held together purely by the blackish crystals that could be seen within the flesh, knitting it together. Almost nothing could be seen of it original colouration; it was the grey of metal, the blackish brown of slagged heat shielding, and, everywhere, coating it like poorly applied paint, the reddish-purple of the ichor of the Evangelion, oozing down the body to pool in the footprints that the monstrosity left as it walked.

Frankly, the fact that the charge beam remained operational spoke that Rei had chosen to shield it with her own body, rather than permit it to be damaged in the same way that Unit 01's weapon had been.

"Rei!" shouted Shinji. "Are you all right?"

"I... remain myself," said Rei, weakly, hyperventilating lungfuls of LCL. "I... remain functional." There was the sound of her swallowing. "Hit. Cooling cycle in process. The supercooled gas hurts," she said, a shiver running through her voice. The other two Children could see the frozen patches of the ichor of the Evangelion, which cracked and fell to the floor as she limped closer to them. "Additional damage sustained to Unit 00's right arm due to recoil." She paused. "I... am sorry. I am distracted. Hit. Shot was blocked by an AT-Field. No damage to target Moloch inflicted. I apologise for my..."

The pause was fully justified, as time seemed to slow to a crawl. On the ground before the Evangelions, the shadows of the titans were suddenly as black as pitch, solid, dark and all consuming, compared to the brilliance that filled the rest of the view. The screens on the entry plugs began to cascade with warnings, even as the walls dimmed, clamping down near instantly on the excessive brightness and normalising the image. Shinji felt an ice-hot knife stab into his right eye, and Unit 01 fell, its mass slamming into the ground (again). Something cracked, the snapping of a giant's ribcage. Unit 02 fared better, Asuka reflexively dropping down at the bright light, as training told her to minimise her profile as best she could. After all, she'd already had her fair share of Migou heavy weapons thrown at her today, and as the glimmering diamond mesh of the AT-Field _together, they had trudged along the side of the road, she holding onto her mother's hand. Her daddy had already been called up, to help fight off the invaders. She had squeezed tight, because, when she looked back, she could see the mass of the landing ships hanging above the city. And a light had flared, and the city had died, because the humans had decided that the invaders could not __be allowed to keep that which they had taken._ enveloped her, forming a radiant wall that hopefully would cover Unit 01 too, she looked back.

If the ventral plasma weapons of the Migou Swarm Ships had been nascent stars in the night, living briefly only to extinguish themselves, then what now blossomed over the horizon was a newborn sun, the vast fireball enveloping Moloch in its entirety, consuming the Herald and blotting out even the light of its AT-Field. And visible through the darkened projection against the wall of the entry plug, even as sirens screamed their warning of dangerous levels of gamma radiation as the ionising radiation punched through the opaque atmosphere, was the oncoming blast wave. It tore apart the sparse vegetation that grew up in the interior of Iceland, instantly carbonised vegetation disintegrating like dust in the wind. The eponymous ice subliminated into plasma, only adding to the wave. It tore off layers of rock, the boulder-sized shrapnel and excreta tossed around like dice in a giant game of the gods. The spares clouds were torn asunder, whipped away like sea mist on a warm day by the newborn sun.

And the fireball rose and rose, and expanded and expanded, and from this cosmic bulb a fungous spire blossomed.

Asuka stared at the inferno that had enveloped Moloch. "That wasn't us," she whispered, softly, awed by the immensity of the sight. "The gamma spike... that's the Migou."

Well, at least the bugs were doing something useful, she thought, as the spire of dust and ash rose from the now-fading sun, thinning slightly to reveal the glittering within.

_Wait._

...

...

Oh no.

That was, of course, when the second Migou warship opened up, and the dying sun produced by the first impact of the relativistic antihydrogen-cored projectile was joined by a new one. And another. And another.

As fireballs which measured in the kilometres bloomed against the Herald, Moloch immersed in fire, Asuka was aware of just how small the Evangelions were. Of how small she was. Over the radio, she heard Shinji start swearing, in a mixture of Japanese, English, and Nazzadi, but she remained silent. There was something almost religious about this moment, as she pulled herself up, braced against the hellish winds that threatened to sweep her off her feet.

No, forget that. There was something truly religious about this.

~'/|\'~

The diminished column of Faithful refugees made their way through the ruins of what had once been their home, before so many monstrous beings had filled the seas and the skies and the land. They were almost being ignored, it seemed; the war passing around them, as Migou and NEG aircraft fought in the skies above, and tanks, mecha and power armour clashed in the streets, firing straight through thin walls to hit targets on the other sides of buildings. No-one seemed to care enough about a cluster of infantry to target them with airstrikes, and although it had been stressful, they had managed to get to cover each time there had been land forces passing. There had been casualties, inevitably, but the strategic positioning of the slowest and weakest had minimised the losses of the _useful_ ones.

And now they were huddled down in the ruins of a school, as the sky to the south was lit by unnaturally bright lights. They could feel the earth shake, both the pulses from the aftershocks of the massive earthquakes, and an almost regular pounding, thuds with a not-dissimilar frequency to the dust filled winds that blew up towards them, that set the Geiger counters screaming. And in the lights, they could see that the entire sky in that direction was filled with massive clouds, vast spires reaching up, intermingling and twisting, like battling sky-giants.

It felt like the world was ending.

The dust from the ruins and the winds and from the emfog that both sides had been using in such vast quantities, would have been choking if Khonatqa had not been wearing the breathing apparatus, especially since she had obtained the superior, modern-military level gear, rather than the CW2-era stuff, which hadn't been designed for this kind of thing. The people who had built the first models (and they had actually constructed it from hand, in virtuous labour; the reason for the use of such old gear was that it did not require precious nanofactory time to manufacture) had never expected for nanoweapons to see battlefield use. It had been before the First Arcanotech War, after all, that strange prototype for the later arcane wars, where all those theoretical designs that the Second Cold War powers had been stockpiling for use against each other saw use against an alien species that had turned out to not be so alien after all. And so, thanks to the inferior protective capacity of the older designs against such volumes, filtration systems and namzappers were giving out, overwhelmed by the volumes that flowed and billowed around them, a hint of silver in the concrete and brick dust. Many of the smaller children were already suffering from emfog inhalation, as well as from nastier agents that were mixed in among the nebulous clouds.

"C-c-come on, Yhu," muttered Ghuhalia, keeping her voice lowered, as they crouched in the remnants of a school building, the bright colours barely visible under the bullet holes. "Just k-k-keep on breathing. It's okay, right? Right? I c-can-can c-carry you, Yhu." She let out a giggle that sounded more like a sob. "Yhu'll be okay. Right? Right?"

The smaller girl didn't respond to the joke, that would have normally had her at the very least hitting her sister. She just kept on breathing, as best she could, in and out, wet gasps from under the over-large gas mask.

"We're at _Yr-neavat-v'fsha_ Primary," the elder girl continued, just talking, almost mindlessly. "You r-r-remember that, Yhu? You w-wanted to... go there, but then mummy... m-m-mummy," Ghulalia began to sob muffled sobs, uselessly trying to wipe her protected eyes with a sleeve, "m-m-mummy is de... no. M-mummy g-got... that new job, and w-w-we had to m-move."

Khonatqa looked down at the pair; her half-sisters. The younger one wasn't going to last much longer, by her reckoning. From the wet sound of the breathing, there was a lethal amount of one of the fast-acting NaM agents in her lungs, probably em-hardened, making it slightly resilient to the older models of emzapper. Once there... well, the enzyme-action was busy tearing apart cell walls. Yhughui'ne was going to drown on her own blood, and fast enough that, even if they could have gotten her to a sorcerer, the lengthy ritual would have taken time that she didn't have.

The older woman, almost one of the Chosen, let her hand fall idly to the pistol at her side. It was far too cruel to let someone go like this, she knew. There wasn't a cure, not one that they could get. And it was a very, very nasty way to die. As part of her training in the _Veer'thyne_, they had had all the militia commanders for their sections watch exactly what happened on an attempted rebel. It had taken the man fifteen minutes to die, and he had screamed until they had administered a paralytic compound to his vocal cords, as he was making too much noise.

But she couldn't do it. She wasn't sure if it was her human instincts, or the deeper ones that came from her emerging Chosen heritage, but, despite the fact that she intellectually knew that this was the kinder option; quick and painless, she couldn't do it. It was almost ridiculous; although they were relatives, she had only met them today, had only found out about them yesterday. And yet, because they happened to have the same father, she was going to let the younger one suffer a painful death merely because she didn't have the damn bravery to face the stare from Ghuhalia.

She hadn't hesitated to gun down that idiot Ubeevoyr, just because he was a jerk and a threat to her position. Now, why wouldn't she provide a mercy killing, and save the girl agony, just because they shared some blood?

Yhughui'ne gurgled, then coughed, a spot of blood somehow making its way to splatter against the clear plating of the eyepiece. "Ghu," she croaked. "Ghu. Hurts... hurts!" She coughed again, hacking fluid up. "Help! Mummy! Help!"

Helplessly, her hand loosened and tightened around the handle of the gun, feeling the webbing between her fingers rub. She merely turned her back in the dying girl, trying her hardest to put it out of her mind, so she could work out how to save the rest. And herself, obviously. Behind her, she could hear Ghulalia sobbing, no longer restrained.

A gunshot.

Khonatqa twirled, weapon raised. The pistol, hanging away by its strap, and comically oversized on the eight year old, was pointed at the ground, the hole in the damaged floor smoking and evident. Ghulalia stared up, eyes red but defiant at the woman. "I c-c-couldn't do it," she wailed. "I can't! It's hurting her, but I can't! And they told.... told us at sc-school that it was b-b-better to do it than let someone hurt like that, but I can't! I couldn't h-help Fr-fraenkis or Ulf or Kair or M-m-mummy and now they're all d-d-dead and I can't even help Yhu by making it stop h-h-hurting!"

Awkwardly, Khonatqa lowered her weapon. She felt like crying, but she couldn't; not any more. Her tear ducts had sealed themselves as part of her transformation, relying on modified eyelids to keep them wet, but she still had enough human in her for the tar-black melancholy to make demands of her body that she do so.

~'/|\'~

Another blast; another sun blossoming over the horizon, lighting up the abused night of the northern winter. Moloch remained intact; worse, it was striking back. Those loathsome tendrils lashed out, waving through the air to puncture the lesser Migou which were still maintaining a flow of steady plasma and laser fire into it. The warships were keeping it pinned, true, unable to move without lessening its AT-Field such that it could die, but they would surely only have a finite supply of antimatter warheads for their railguns. And every shot they fired increased the risk that... other things would wake from the dreaming sleep of unbeing. It was a stalemate which the Herald could only win. And so, now, the {SLEEPER IN FIRE}, Moloch, weathered the storm of annihilating particle and antiparticle, AT-Field bright.

"Don't you see it!" shouted Asuka, a sudden tone of excitement in her voice. "Yes! It's so obvious!"

"Yes... I have no idea what you're talking about," managed Shinji.

"Shut up, and let me explain, idiot," she said, equal parts stress and elation in her voice. She was on fire, it seemed, the stress pushing her mind towards conclusions that she never would have been able to reach had the danger of death been so severe. This was not an adrenaline rush, no, because adrenaline inhibited higher cognitive functions to allow flood flow to vital muscles; this was a sudden clarity that came from the necessity for survival, and all those things she had read slotting together when given a physical specimen. "You remember Mot, you two." It was not a question. "Remember how it concentrated the AT-Field at specific points, in order to deal with the concentrated fire from the Migou ships first, and then your laser, Shinji?"

"That... that is what it did," managed Rei.

"If we assume that the average AT-Field density over the surface is conserved..."

"Why sh-should we do... such a thing," asked the pale girl.

"The Xu-Nordsstrom Principle," was the quickfire answer. "The r-state of local space is such that the X-N tensor is necessarily limited to a finite value if the Herald doesn't want a Zone-like ASZ. As we found with the last one."

"That is... logical."

"I'm so glad you agree," Asuka replied, a hint of acid in her tone. "Logically, therefore, to survive a bombardment like this, when the resilience that it is demonstrating is compared to previous such entities, it will have its AT-Field at a maximum, because it's surviving stuff that all the others wouldn't have stood a chance against. Now, Migou antimatter weapons use element-n-s with an n-value matrix which is fairly close to, if not identical to, that of conventional matter, and the r-state of local space is, again, such that the Weyl and Ricci tensors approximate to that of flat Minskowski space-time"

"Yes," said Rei."

"I have no idea what you are saying!" blurted out Shinji. These were just... words, strung together. In fact, he was fairly sure that Asuka was in fact just making it upon the spot. In his opinion, the fact that she wasn't bothering to think up words, and just saying things like 'element-n-s' was a dead giveaway. And the fact that Rei seemed to be playing along with it...

... no that wasn't fair. It was just that, well, in the land of the geniuses, the normally-bright one gets the low-paid menial jobs. Of course, spraying microcleanser would actually be a lot safer than piloting a giant robot-thing.

"Yes. That's because I'm the one with the degree, not you. And Rei cheats." Asuka paused. "How to put this... ah. The big bad monster thing has a _magical_ shield, which has a discrete and finite... which can only be so _strong_, and it has it mostly facing the direction that the Migou are shooting from. And space-time isn't so _bendy_ that we can't say that straight lines are straight."

Shinji made a disgusted noise in the back of his throat. "Okay, okay. I get it. There's no need to be offensively patronising like that."

Asuka shrugged. "The dumbed-down explanation was, technically speaking, wrong. Anyway. Yes, there was a need, because you weren't going to understand it any other way."

Shinji managed to bite back a retort since, technically speaking (only technically, though, he reassured himself), she was right.

"You... you suggest that w-we connect the mD/D-Engines of the Evangelions together, and... then move to a p-p-position where I can t-target the underside," asked Rei, the pain in her voice evident.

"Yes."

"The... the... Unit 00 has sustained c-critical damage. The charge beam will not withstand a shot of that yield."

"Neither will it withstand the Herald, when it deals with the Migou. This is the only way we can kill that thing, when it's distracted! You will do it, First Child, because I'm telling you to!"

"I know who you are," Rei whispered, in a soft tone. "Are you sure?"

"Yes! Yes I am! It's our only hope to survive!"

There was a moment of silence. Then;

"I will do it."

Shinji felt it was time to make another contribution. "So, basically, we're going to run underneath it and shoot it with all of us plugged into the Rei Gun?"

"That is not its..."

"Yes," interrupted Asuka. "Except, you know, I'll actually put some thought into it."

"And, why, exactly, have we not already tried this?"

"Because, in case you don't remember, Third Child, there is a antimatter double-digit megatonne-yield bombardment in process. That means that getting under will be really hard."

"We... we will not need to get directly under the a-assigned target," corrected Rei. "A valid firing solution... can be obtained from further away."

"Where?"

"I know where."

Footstep after footstep, the three Children dove into the fire that surrounded Moloch, knights wrapped in shining light. One vast wall, as all three AT-Fields merged and blurred, discrete yet unified in the way that they covered each other, through the hellish opaque landscape that had painted itself upon the surface of the Earth. The scales were confusing, as if reality itself was breaking down; at one moment, the Herald was so close, and barely larger than an Eva; the next, it was a sky-leviathan on the distant horizon.

"I... think I'm going to be sick," groaned Shinji, but he did not let up his pace, just concentrating at best he could upon the feeling of running, of the pounding, jerking motion as the LCL-filled capsule swayed to and fro with the steps of the armoured titan.

Asuka stared up at the Migou-spawned suns before her, eyes reflecting even the dimmed light which the entry-plug wall displayed. It was amazing, and it was beautiful in its cold, dispassionate way. It was the beauty of large numbers and of geometry. As the AT-Field, those shimmering, cracked fractures in reality itself, that was projected from her out-reached palm, grew brighter and brighter, she was sure that she had never felt more alive, more complete. She lived for these moments, on the edge of her seat in the entry plug, caught between one moment and the next, burning so bright. When you had seen newborn suns and killed beings that some would have called god-like, was there any wonder that the world outside the Eva was cold and grey?

And Rei? She did not think. She reacted. She performed the optimal task at each moment, as if she had drilled for years. Because, in a sense, she had. She knew what was necessary, and what was coming next; what had to happen, and what would happen. Thought was not necessary, because it was obsolete, an automaton in her own body, to escape the damage and the agony from what the Migou had done to her and Unit 00.

But all too soon, she opened her eyes, and returned to the pain of her body and of the Evangelion.

"Stop," she said, flatly. "We are here. Please grant full access to your internal mD/D-Engine to Unit 00."

Shinji swallowed, watching as the **[limitedpower]** icon emerged, the torso-strands of the image of the Evangelion on the plug wall turning red. "Okay," he said, keenly aware of the fact that he could not run away any more; at least without tapping into the internal batteries and their pathetically limited five minutes of power. "Do it."

"Yes," echoed Asuka, almost identical emotions flowing through her head. It was the loss of control, she felt; the fact that you might be dependent on some external power for your Evangelion's (and thus your own) well being, that was so bad, she decided.

Rei lifted the charge beam, wincing as the mass of the weapon pulled at her heavily damaged arm. The gun was not pointed anywhere near the Herald. That was fully intentional. She could _feel_ what it was doing to space-time What the Second Child had intellectually called the Xu-Nordsstrom tensor, Rei could feel, in the same way as others could detect a limited spectrum of electromagnetic radiation. It was tearing the worldlines of the things within its Domain apart, shredding space and time at a level far beyond the tight manipulations of the AT-Fields of the Evangelions.

And it was going to win. The fact was simple. It was fully awake before the celestial conjunction, and the Migou would not be able to kill it properly. It would reign over the Earth and the stars, as a fully awake {THREAT} (for the Migou named their foes well, Rei felt), awakened early by human and Deep One stupidity. Dagon had felt that the {SLEEPER IN FIRE} was an ally of his master. Dagon had been wrong. It was not an ally; it was a rival, an opponent.

But there was a way through the mess of timelike curves that it was spinning to save itself from anti-matter annihilation. A way to ensure that the Herald would be slain.

She raised her fingers from the control yokes, and flexed them, taking a deep, shuddering gulp of LCL.

"Hurry up, Rei," shouted Asuka, her voice far away. "The D-Cells are starting to show signs of incipient avalanche breakdowns. We don't want a Horizon Event!"

Ignoring the other girl, Rei reached down, and made a few fine adjustments on an AR-interface before her, adjusting the aim manually; the LAIs in the software shutdown due to the impossible, as they saw it, physical conditions.

A single tear trickled into the LCL as she fired.

The stream of relativistic protons propagated outwards through space, the path from their own frame of reference perfectly straight, but from the eyes of the Evangelions an impossible sequence of tight curves that could only be seen by the green aftertrail of ionised air. It bent _underneath_ the Herald, rising to hit its bulk (for it seemed to be massive, and far away at the moment) in the centre, punching up through the weakened underside of the AT-Field.

The Herald exploded into a vast amorphous cloud of sepulchral gas; the greens of a punctured tomb blended with purples and impossible fluorescences that should not be, and would have not been had it not been for what Moloch had been doing to the universe.

And the charge beam, damaged, out of coolant, abused and overcharged, tore itself apart; white-hot shrapnel tearing into the heavily damaged Unit 00 and through it, reddish-purple blood painting arcs in the air.

~'/|\'~

Rei Ayanami was still alive. That surprised her. She should be dead; she knew that for a fact. The shrapnel had scythed its way through the entry plug, and she had felt the shards punch through her body as they tore through both walls, as the LCL that had filled the plug flowed out through the holes. The mangled remains of her body were wedged under the control yoke, and Rei gazed up, unmoving, at the interface between the air and the fluid, her own reflection showing just how injured she was. As if she was not already fully aware of this fact.

There was no pain, and that was a bad sign, for there had been pain aplenty in the synchronicity accident with the Evangelion.

And she should be dead.

_Ah. I know you are there, brother._

A mental chuckle, filled with strain.

_Hah. Not brother, not really. There is no term in any human language for how we are related._

_Half-brother approximates the best, though._

_Yes. Yes it does._

A pause.

_You should not be able to do this._

_I know. I am killing the _others _to keep you alive._

_It will not last forever._

_But it can work for now. For long enough._

A bubbling cough from a punctured lung.

_No. I am already dead. I know it in my past, in my present, and my future._

_You cannot be. I am going to keep you alive, if it kills... oh._

_Yes. This can only end one way. She is already awake, for they roused her with all that contact. And now her rage will be focussed. It... it is necessary._

_I know what will happen. You know what will happen._

_Yes._

_It is inevitable._

_It has already happened. You are just keeping her from noticing it. And she will notice the deaths of the others, eventually._

A bitter laugh.

_And then she will notice you. And then she will notice me, and I will not be able to hold out. She's already won, hasn't she._

_Yes. It was better than all the alternatives I could see._

A pause, a timeless moment of gulped LCL.

_And now she's here._

The girl, eyes fading to blackness, felt a pair of cool arms encircle her, felt the rage and the horror and the pain and the agony and the hatred and the disgust and the sorrow and the loathing and the love through the soft lips on her cheek.

**my baby**

Rei Ayanami died with the faintest smile on her face.

~'/|\'~

**my baby! give her back!**  
_Zwar du erschrakst ihm das Herz; doch ältere Schrecken_  
**she's scared of her touch**  
_stürzten in ihn bei dem berührenden Anstoß._  
**she's scared. she said no.**  
_Ruf ihn... du rufst ihn nicht ganz aus dunkelem Umgang._  
**she died in mind and soul when she tried to touch her**  
_Freilich, er will, er entspringt; erleichtert gewöhnt er_  
**to hug her**  
_sich in dein heimliches Herz und nimmt und beginnt sich._  
**just like everyone else**  
_Aber begann er sich je?_  
**what kind of thing spawns itself?**  
_Mutter, du machtest ihn klein, du warsts, die ihn anfing;_  
**and so she prepared a meal for that which had carried her**  
_dir war er neu, du beugtest über die neuen_  
**willing or not, it makes no difference**  
_Augen die freundliche Welt und wehrtest der fremden._  
**who can scare away the darkness**  
_Wo, ach, hin sind die Jahre, da du ihm einfach_  
**when they have not seen the light of day for forty years?**  
_mit der schlanken Gestalt wallendes Chaos vertratst?_

~'/|\'~

The vast nebulous cloud of that which had-been-and-would-be Moloch hung in the air, a stinking presence that devoured light only to spew it forth in colours and spectra not native to Earth. The sound was not indescribable, but to make such an attempt was impossible, for the minds of men could not know its ear-tearing immensity nor its sheer spectral range. The venomous seething of the radiance that was all too familiar to those who had gazed upon an AT-Field before expanded, then contracted, hints of solidity impossibly forming once again before another expansion tore them back into nothingness and left only the reality-saturated gas.

The mind within the amorphous thing, that in a sense was it, thought; in no manner akin to that of mortal man, but still it thought.

_**I** Exist  
Therefore **I** Exist._

**I** Exist  
Therefore **I** Feel.

**I** Feel  
Therefore **I** Know.

**I** Know  
Therefore **I** Am Aware That There Are Those  
Who Would Oppose Me

**I** Am Aware  
Therefore **I** Understand Them.

**I** Understand Them  
Therefore They Are Weak

They Are Weak  
Therefore **I** Prevail.

But all was not right in the sepulchral cloud. It could feel the weakened shards of a rival nearby, and longed to consume and devour them. It could feel the death all around it, as things warred.

And it could feel something else. Watching. Waiting. Hungry.

_one footstep. another, on no solid ground, nor within the normal set of dimensions. bloody footprints in space and time and souls._

The great beast felt another mind brush up against his. Smaller, yes, and massively weaker.

But awake. So awake, even in this time before the necessary time of rightness. It could feel itself being summoned to the deathless sleep of nothingness once again, because the conditions were not right to live again. But that mind... it was awake, and aware, and was viable under such cruel conditions.

But where was it?

The {SLEEPER IN FIRE} searched around, reaching out from beyond the protective barrier of its soul to hunt for this rival that stalked it while it was still too weak to act as it wished, still forced into a barren, cold reality with horrifically low ambient energy levels that forced it to rest in the core of this ball of rock if it wished to live-sleep, remain alive though of limited awarness.

No sign. No trace. But around it... the world was wrong. It could feel that there was the absense of the sense of certain rivals, ceratain abominable enemies it had known before, and that they were not where they should be. Dead? Perhaps. It had slept for over sixty million cycles of this ball of rock; perhaps such things had come to past.

But where was the rival?

It must think! It must drive away the fog of sleep and of this rude awakening from its mind, and function as best it can!

_I Exist  
There I Will Prevail._

I Will Prevail  
Therefore I Will Eliminate All Foes  
_Regardless of Their Esteem_

I Will Eliminate All Foes  
Therefore I Shall Discover Where **no**

**a door which is open is not guarded**

**you deserve to die**

**you killed her**

you are not  
not anymore

And so that which-had-been-called-Moloch died, and was consumed.

A new god's in her heaven, all's right with the world.

~'/|\'~

The sky was wracked with blinding light, as the cloud dispersed, full-spectrum em radiation flooding the sensors of the Evangelions as the Herald died. There may have been whoops of joy elsewhere, but both the Second and Third Children were silent.

Suddenly, the communications systems in Unit 01 flared to life. A sibilant, whispering crackle filled them, from which no discernible words could be heard.

"Asuka! Misato?" yelped Shinji, the coppery taste of his own blood, from the bitten lip, discernible even through the already-bloodlike LCL. "Did you just see that? What... why... what just happened?" He swallowed, the LCL momentarily overpowering his own blood, before the tears came, completely unnoticeable in the fluid around him. "Well... the Herald is dead. Whatever happened. But... but... Rei. She's dead. Th-there's no way that.... that she could have survived that/ It... it... it," he gulped, "...it went right through the entry plug. Oh... oh..."and he began to sob, uncontrollable breathless shakes that made communication impossible.

A cool hand reached out, and stroked him on the cheek. Reflexively wiping his eyes against the sleeve of the plug suit, for what little good it did, he looked up.

A naked, emaciated woman, her dark hair hanging around her head like dead seaweed in the currents of the orange fluid, hung before him. From under the veil of her hair, two hate-filled eyes glared, accusing him of unknown deeds. Behind her, the wall of the entry plug was malfunctioning, red and yellow and orange coloured warnings flowing flamelike over a blank metal wall.

Shinji screamed then, screamed even as the unnoticeable tears flowed from his eyes, and pulled back, cowering back into the seat in the entry plug to get away from the figure of horror before him. That was when the pain hit him, and the screams changed from ones of terror, to ones of agony.

The human body is an incredibly complicated structure. For one, it is not one specific thing, unlike some other xenobiological lifeforms, but in fact, a broad category of so many components, which covers the organs, muscles, skeletal structure, nervous system, viscera, fat reserves... and even these things are broad categories in their own right. It is an ensemble of any different types of cell, no longer homogeneous, as their forebears once were, and each cell type approaches the complexity of entire organisms. Just compare a bacterium to the smooth muscle cells in the heart, say, or even the ultra-specialised nature of the red blood cell, evolved to maximise its own surface area to volume ratio such that it does not even had a nucleus any more, and the wonders of emergent structure can be seen. Who would have thought that crude bacteria-like lifeforms could end up as something so incredibly complex? And that is before the amazing structure of the brain, a matrix of water and trace elements that somehow produces, through the emergent interaction of its components, the seeming of consciousness. Marvellous.

It does not survive well when it is torn apart from the inside, blood superheated and muscles torn internally by precise telekinetic movements. All that was left... that that _she_ left were the bones, scraps of flesh clinging to the the smooth surface, bound together by the shredded remnants of the plug suit, floating in an expanding cloud of discoloured LCL. The light in Unit 01's one remaining eye evaporated, and it slumped, falling to the ground with an earth-shattering thud.

And the Evangelion suffered the same fate as its pilot, painting the landscape with the ichor of the thing.

Asuka watched the Test Model fall, and spun, firing wildly, melting the earth, trying to find whatever was doing this. She couldn't even see; the blood from Unit 01 smeared her sensors, and even the light of the star-matter that came forth from the plasmathrower was not enough to burn through; in fact, it caked the ichor of the fallen beast to her armour and over her sensors.

"Die!" she screamed, as she blindly searched for her unknown target, operating barely above an instinctual level. "Die! Die! Die! D..."

Something hammered straight into her AT-Field _she had spoken wi_**they had taken her baby from her** and tore straight through, radiance nullified by an opposed field, already prodigious capacities empowered by the consumed Herald and Unit 01.

She was the second death. The second, of the human species and its subspecies.

They all deserved to die.

~'/|\'~

This was no peaceful oblivion. The poet was wrong. The world died not with a whimper (unless it was the final yelp of an abused puppy, beaten to death by callous children), but with a bang.

The mother was everywhere. In every shadow, behind every window, the newborn godling attuned to the race which had spawned her. Which had treated her like this.

The walls were painted red, bodies rent asunder across the globe, as the extermination occurred. Flesh liquefied, leaving only charred skeletal remains where they had fallen. And with each death, each consumption, she grew more than she had been, and she was great indeed.

There was no closure. No explanation. No happy endings. Only death.

And retaliation.

Soon, it was done. How soon, was a somewhat dubious question. Time was a human concept, and there were no more humans. Out of... what would it be? Boredom? Amusement? A realisation that they might pose a threat? Some residual human feelings, passed up from her own devoured children? Whatever the reason, she turned her attentions to the Deep Ones.

The seas ran red with blood.

The Migou, horrified by what had happened, tried to kill the planet, negating all attempts at subtlety in a desperate bid to contain the {THREAT}. Blank-faced, she danced inside the continent-sized blossoms of flame, as all turned to ash and dust, the bloody footprints she left behind infused into the glass of what had once been a world.

Soon, empty tombs drifted through the void, Migou flesh just as weak as human flesh.

Other things woke.

She killed and ate them too, just as she had Moloch, for they were weak and newly stirred from the sleep that was death, while she was strong. Something that could be made incorporeal by a mere physical impact when newly awakened stood no chance against her, fortified as she was by an entire biosphere and so many other, greater beings. On a dead world, of barren rock and ruined cities and endless desert and dead seas, the atmosphere once again returning to its natural, anaerobic state, she played.

Soon, she grew bored. How soon, it could not be said, because time was a human concept, and she was far, far from that now-forgotten dead species, which only existed as lased archival records stored by nearby Migou systems; a number and record, buried deep. So she moved on.

Idols were built by the things that were driven mad by her passage through their worlds. She did not care, and did not spare them for it; nor did she target them for it. They were so far beneath her comprehension now, that she did not understand such a thing. If she ever had; what kind of a being was locked in time, unable to feel the past or see the future? What kind of being could not understand the simple mechanical awareness of a matrix of dirty water, feel the universe that flowed around it and change it as it saw fit, or simply go where it wished, how it wished? And against eternity, such a being was brief, transitory, such that it was almost a rounding error. And she could make it so it was.

Soon, she grew bored. How soon, it could not be said, because against the immensity of aeons, time itself withered and died. She chose to sleep then, in the deathless sleep of unbeing that was filled with dreams.

Across the galaxy, statues would be found in the crafts of primitive, now-dead cultures, on many different worlds. And yet they all shared some characteristics. A roughly bipedal form; swathed in some crude kind of garment that many such races had painted using iron oxide; two eyes that stared forth from under a veil of hair in chiselled granite and cave painting alike, positioned on the upper appendage, above a maw which remained sealed in a blank expression which gave the poor archaeologists who found it a feeling that they were but insects.

And they grew afraid, for cults spoke of the time that this being would awake, and break down the old laws, dancing free and unconstrained, in killing and bloodshed and amoral apathy.

Soon, she awoke. How soon, it could not be said, for even the stars burned dim with aeons past. Some even tried to stop her, in crude mechanisms and with poorly understood sciences and sorceries, to valiantly hold her off for just one more day of survival, or even to steal the powers of that which they knew of only as a god.

They died too.

Nyarlathotep watched all this. And a slight frown marred his undying mask.

_How boring._

~*/|\*~


End file.
